


A Proper Bargain

by JustOnlyGinger



Series: The Man and the Mare [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Forced Pregnancy, M/M, Master/Slave, Pregnancy Kink, Pregnant Sex, Public Humiliation, Sexual Slavery, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2018-08-22 11:40:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 47,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8284504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustOnlyGinger/pseuds/JustOnlyGinger
Summary: Prompt: bargain-basement slaves. This whole "human livestock" thing is happening.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi I'm Ginger and everything I write devolves into pregnancy kink

"What's your name, slave?" The man looks at Ivy as if fully expecting him to be too stupid to remember his own name, as if the automobile accident that sheared off his left arm above the elbow had also robbed him of most of his brain capacity.

"Ivy," he answers. He endeavors to be patient. He always does, because he knows it will serve him well, that one day he'll have his own kind master and warm clothes and three meals a day and a soft mat to sleep on in front of the fire. If he keeps his head bowed and his eyes down and performs every action and answers every question asked of him, one day he'll be rewarded.

"That's a woman's name."

"Not always." Ivy bites his tongue- he knows he ought not to contradict a freeman-- but the man appears not to notice. If either of them is a dullard, it's him, Ivy thinks, and immediately chides himself for thinking it. This man is well-spoken and finely dressed and not a slave like him, this man is his better in every way and Ivy would do well to be kind to him even in his thoughts. Thoughts become deeds, after all, if you think them long enough.

"You have a cock, don't you. Or did you lose that as well?"

"He's completely intact," says the slave peddler. "Apart from his obvious deficiency. Here, see for yourself." The peddler nods in his direction, and Ivy recognizes the signal. He unbuttons his thin tattered trousers and lets them fall around his ankles, and the gentleman steps forward and takes hold of him, pulls rather rudely at his cock and balls but Ivy knows he has no choice but to permit himself to be handled.

"Good lord, look at this thing. He's like a horse."

"Virile as a stallion too, my good man. With this one you're getting a champion breeder for the price of a frail old eunuch. His seed's been proven, I can point out his offspring to you. Strong and sturdy, the lot of them, most still living in this very town."

"I don't want a breeder."

"Well, I hardly mean to suggest that that's all he's good for. Look, he's strong. See these shoulders? Put a yoke on him, he can pull like an ox. Fast too, you know, speed and strength, I've seen him outrun a pony at full gallop for a distance of--"

"What good is a slave that can run?" The peddler reaches up to straighten his hat, and Ivy can see he's annoyed, his ingratiating smile gone flat and fixed at the edges. He motions to Ivy to pull his pants back up and Ivy does, grateful for the warmth; it wouldn't be his place to complain of a frostbitten cock, but it certainly wouldn't add coins to his asking price either.

"I'll be blunt. Your stud here has one arm and a face like a mule, and his wind is wrecked. I'm willing to bet he can't lift or haul half as well as you say. Someone was careless with him and ruined him for hard work, and you'll be lucky to get a shiny dime for him from the scrap yard."

"Well, sir, if all you're interested in is slandering my merchandise--"

"Ten dollars."

"Pardon?"

"I'll give you ten dollars in silver if you turn him over to me right now."

"I can't let him go for less than fifteen."

"Then no one's going to buy him and you're going to have to put him out to pasture and pay for his upkeep until one of you's in the grave. And when he kicks off, that's easily another five dollars to have his body hauled away." The peddler fidgets and fusses and plucks at his hatband and Ivy feels his chest swell with pride; he made a good showing, he knows, and now he's about to be sold.

Ivy watches with interest as the gentleman takes a cloth bag from the valise he's carrying and counts out ten shiny silver dollar coins. There it is, he thinks, the price of his life, the true measure of his worth; practically double what the slave peddler had expected to get for him, and isn't that something to be proud of? Not quite decrepit enough for the scrap yard, the peddler had said, he's worth a good five or six bucks, easy. And now here he is being sold for ten, his new master taking him by the arm and leading him away, and he knows he shouldn't talk unless a freeman addresses him directly but he can't keep his joy from bubbling over into words.

“Sir, master, I'm sorry, I wanted to say... I mean, I'm really grateful that--”

“That's enough of your goddamn mouth.” The man jabs Ivy in the ribs with the handle of his walking stick. “Don't play stupid, I know you've been taught not to speak until you're spoken to. Seen and not heard, but then, you're not much to look at, are you?” Ivy shakes his head, unsure how or if he ought to answer the question. His master cracks him across the backs of his knees with the walking stick and he stumbles and almost falls in the rutted mud of the street.

“Don't worry, ugly, I've got a plum assignment for you.” They've stopped in front of the wide plate-glass window of the dry-goods store. There are a few people inside, and people outside going about their business all bundled up against the winter cold. Ivy peers through the glass at the high shelves full of bolts of fabric, imagining being fitted for a new wardrobe, having clothes to wear that aren't ancient and patched and moth-eaten, clothes that will keep him warm and dry, clothes that actually suit him, and he knows he hasn't earned it yet but he still can't help but hope.

“Strip.” His master tugs at his shirtsleeve again, and Ivy knows that a well-trained slave always obeys orders without thinking, but he's already cold in his worn-thin shirt and trousers and if he takes his clothes off now people are going to look, people are going to see him standing here naked in broad daylight and think his master is a pimp instead of a gentleman and that's not something either of them wants.

“Do you want me to? Here?” Surely Ivy's master will realize his error and change his mind; but he doesn't, only narrows his eyes at Ivy as if he's just confirmed himself to be dangerously stupid.

“Strip off now and get down on your knees. You're gonna show me how you handle a cock.” 

“Sir, I don't think--” What he's asking for is just this side of permitted, but anyone who sees Ivy naked and on his knees at his master's feet is going to think he's been sold to a brothel or worse. Ivy protests as politely as he can, but finds himself thrown to the ground and set upon with the walking stick and by the time his master's stopped beating him and allowed him to sit up a small crowd has gathered in the street around them, about a dozen people trying to look nonchalant as they shove and jostle each other and press in for a closer look.

“What's the problem here? Your mouth works just fine, doesn't it?” He presses the point of his walking stick to Ivy's throat, forcing him to hold his head up, and addresses the people crowding around. “Ugly son of a bitch, isn't he? Ought to put a bag over his head and cut a hole in it so I don't have to look at him while I fuck his mouth.” There are a couple of scandalized gasps from the audience, and a lot of audible breathing, although Ivy's starting to feel like his own throat is closing up. The clothes he has on tear as easily as old rags, and he's grasped and pulled and passed from one pair of hands to another until there isn't a stitch left on him. There has to be some mistake, he thinks. Only slaves who run away or curse at their masters or laze around instead of working end up like this, and he's never been anything but steady and reliable and good-hearted, has always and only done exactly what was asked of him.

“Sir, I--”

“Speaking out of turn again. Real prize, this one.” Ivy hears the swish and crack of the walking stick as it catches him across the face, and it hurts so much that he can't help but let out a whimper even though he knows it's important to be silent when his master corrects him. He's been trained to endure any number of unpleasant things without making a sound, but now he finds himself unable to bite down on his cries of pain no matter how hard he tries. He can feel tears in his eyes, but he won't allow himself to weep.

“Look at me.” His master presses the point of the walking stick to Ivy's throat again, and Ivy looks up at the man's bland weathered face and watery gray eyes. He's no prize himself, Ivy thinks, disloyally. Though it isn't necessary, of course, that he find his master attractive, he must keep such blasphemous criticisms from his thoughts. He is a properly trained slave, and such disrespect, even within his own mind, is unworthy of him.

“Do you want what I have for you?” The man is unbuttoning his trousers, and Ivy kneels, watching him. The crowd of people gathered around them keep a respectful distance, and Ivy recognizes slaves he's served alongside, several now freed, and women he's fathered children on. No one gives any indication that they recognize him; he's alone in his disgrace, sold to a stranger, who approaches him now with his trousers around his knees and his cock in one hand while the other still brandishes his stick.

“I don't think you ought to--” One last time, Ivy attempts to reason with his master, and again all he receives for his trouble is a crack across the face with the walking stick. This time he can feel his skin split but he doesn't raise his hand to staunch the flow of blood from the wound, only hangs his head and opens his mouth and allows his master to grasp the back of his head and thrust into him with one long firm stroke, and this time he approves of Ivy's actions. He strokes his hair and speaks sweetly to him and fucks his mouth with what Ivy judges to be the stamina and vigor of a much younger man, and Ivy does his best to keep silent, to swallow back tears, to keep himself from sobbing for breath on those rare occasions when his throat is unobstructed enough to allow for the passage of air.

At least it's over quickly. His master withdraws and comes on Ivy's face, not without a great deal of crowing about how the addition has improved his looks, and the crowd disperses and the day is darkening toward evening and growing still colder and Ivy still doesn't have any clothes on but he knows there's no use in bringing this to his master's attention.

His master leads him through the streets as the lamps are being lit, and into a dank alley he's never had occasion to investigate before, and at the end of the alley is a flight of stairs descending into the earth and at the bottom of the stairs is a door. Ivy is pushed inside, stumbles over the threshold, falls to his knees on what appears to be an unfinished stone floor as the door closes and locks behind him. It's pitch-dark here, and stone-silent, and smells awful, but at least for the time being he won't have to endure his new master's company. He feels along the wall until he finds a corner and falls asleep curled up there with his arm around his knees and his head tucked against his shoulder.

Ivy dreams of an unfamiliar voice speaking softly to him, and when he wakes he can still hear it although he can't see who it belongs to. Whoever it is is stroking his hair soothingly and pressing a damp cloth to his face where it had been split open by his master's walking stick, and he doesn't know whether to be affronted or grateful. He doesn't deserve any comfort, having behaved as he did, and he generally dislikes being touched, but the throbbing pain in his head seems to have lessened and he can't very well be indignant about that.

“Pardon me,” the stranger says. “Are you awake?” Ivy doesn't answer, is busy trying to swallow back the sour taste in his mouth.

“You are awake. Excuse me for being forward, but I couldn't help but notice that your face was covered with blood and jizz.”

“Who are you?” Ivy manages to regain his voice, but feels as though he needs to spit, sets about trying to hawk up all the nastiness in his throat as efficiently as possible. He propels it as far as he can into the undifferentiated darkness, hoping that there doesn't happen to be anyone sleeping over there.

“Just another bottom-of-the-barrel slave like you. Bit rough, isn't it, finishing up here.”

“Where?”

“Man of few words, eh. I like you.” The stranger's hands have withdrawn, but the memory of their touch makes Ivy's skin prickle in a not-unpleasant way. He raises his hand to his face, probes at the wound and the bruised skin surrounding it. He's stopped bleeding, nothing's broken, he'll be able to serve his master again as soon as he's called upon to do so. He rejects the disloyal but insistent thought that he doesn't want to serve his master again, that he'd rather be locked up in this cold dirty cellar for the rest of his natural life than be subjected to another scene like the one his master had made yesterday. And to think he was once a high-quality slave, a tireless worker, uncomplaining and admired by all whether he was laboring in the fields or standing at stud to produce more slaves of his type. His bloodline had been thought worth continuing, but now here he was, discarded. At the bottom of the barrel, it's true.

“So what happened to you?”

“What?”

“You've got an arm off. I couldn't help noticing.”

“Leave me alone.” Ivy turns toward the wall again, fully intending to go back to sleep, but his unseen companion won't leave him in peace.

“Sensitive subject. Of course. I understand that.” A moment's pause, during which Ivy allows himself to hope that his interlocutor has lost interest. “I'm Hawkes, by the way.”

“Hmm.”

“Brewerton Hawkes. I wasn't always a slave. I used to have a farm of my own, and a wife and children and everything.” Another pause, longer than the first. “What's your name, friend?”

“Ivy.”

“No surname?”

“I've never had one.”

“You were born to the life, then.”

“My mother was a slave. Our mistress allowed her to name the children she bore, but she had no surname to give them. She was Mistress' best broodmare, and she was treated well.” He would never admit it, but Ivy still sorrows for his mother, still remembers all too well the day he was taken from her. He had been her favorite, and she spoiled him with affection. This was what he was told, that she had loved him too fiercely, hugged and kissed and soothed and sang to him too much, and that was why he'd had to be corrected so often as a child. He learned quickly, though, and became as he grew an exemplary slave, by the accounts of all who knew him. He forgot his mother's face, but he remembers that she had been weeping when they parted for the last time.

“And you, are you breeding stock as well?” Ivy sighs, and settles his face into his folded arm, and ignores Hawkes long enough to indicate his displeasure at the question.

“I stand at stud when it's asked of me.”

“How thrilling. What a pleasant duty that must be.”

“All duties are pleasant duties.” Hawkes, at last, has run short of replies, and Ivy closes his eyes and presses himself against the wall and finally falls asleep despite the cold and the general disagreeableness of his rough surroundings.

When he wakes again he supposes it's morning, although the light is very dim, diffused through a narrow grimy window set high up in one wall of what he can now see is a square stone chamber like a cell, unfurnished, the floor appearing to have been variously stained and scoured over a long period of time. His companion from the night before is the only other person here, as naked as he is and sprawled on his back fast asleep, and Ivy studies him and finds him only marginally more interesting than the bare stone walls and floor. Hawkes is a thin man, his hair curling and grayed, his skin creased with age. His face is weak-chinned but pleasant in repose, his complexion rather bad even for a slave. He's been burned, Ivy realizes; there are systematic pockmarks scattered over his face and nothing remains of his right ear but an oddly twisted and dangling wisp of flesh. His disfigurement and his rickety old body are a match for Ivy's bad wind and missing arm; neither of them can be salvaged, he thinks.

Ivy waits, and as the light in the room grows so does his conviction that there remains nothing in his life to look forward to, only more harsh treatment, more beating and cursing, being cracked across the face with his master's walking stick and forced to suck his loathsome cock. It would have been better if he had been hauled off to the knacker's yard after he lost his arm; at least then a bit of his dignity might have been preserved.

Ivy waits patiently, watching the light from the small window grow stronger, anticipating the return of his master and further humiliation, occasionally glancing at the sprawled and snoring figure of Hawkes by the opposite wall. Long minutes go by, and Hawkes doesn't wake, and no one else appears. Ivy is cold and hungry and stiff all over from sleeping on the hard floor, but as usual there's no point in complaining, if there were anyone to hear his complaints.

At last the door opens and someone is thrown inside- really thrown, as they don't appear to be conscious-- and Ivy sees at once that it's another slave. Another bargain hunter's find, someone else who's narrowly avoided being scrapped for parts. A boy, this one, small-statured and scrawny. Pale-complected, freckled, with hair as red as a cock's comb. Unlike Ivy and Hawkes, he has no obvious disfigurement, but he must be unfit somehow. Ivy quickly discovers that watching two people sleep is just as dull as watching one, and he's tucking his head under his arm and preparing to go back to sleep himself when the door opens a second time.

The man who enters isn't his master, but Ivy recognizes him all the same. He's a sturdy fellow, well into his middle years, with uncombed gray hair to his shoulders and a neatly trimmed white beard. He has blue eyes under heavy dark brows, and the windburned face of an old mountain man.

"Slim pickings," he says, as if to himself. He's carrying a walking stick, and he uses it to nudge Ivy's shoulder. "On your feet, slave. Come on, I know you're awake." Ivy stands, and his posture is irreproachable, as always. Chin in, chest out, back straight, feet planted a shoulder's width apart. The man begins to examine him, pressing with cold hard-edged hands at Ivy's chest and belly, feeling the thickness of fat beginning to spread over the muscle.

"Got a nice pair of tits on you, boy. Putting on weight for the winter, are we?" Ivy says nothing, and the man's eyes are still traveling upward, and when they reach his face they stop.

"Hell's bells," he mutters. "I know you, don't I? You're Cinnamon's foal. Her firstborn, what is it she called you now..."

"Ivy."

"Of course, I remember now. All right, I'll take you, and the lad over there. Fetch him for me, will you?" Ivy kneels beside the red-haired slave and shakes him gently by the shoulder. He groans, rolls over, and finally sits up, bewildered and blinking. "The gentleman wants both of us," Ivy says, by way of explanation.

"What for?"

"Never mind that. Just get up." The boy rises languidly to his feet and stretches his arms above his head, yawning and cracking his spine audibly. Now Ivy sees the flaw in him, the reason he's ended up here among slaves too old and broken-down to serve in a decent household. He has a prisoner's tattoo, a hastily hacked out set of initials in grainy black ink. It sits on his side above his jutting hip, stretches when he stretches, and Ivy resists an odd urge to reach out and touch the inked letters.

He follows the man -whose name he's sure he knows if only he could recall it-- out into the bright sunlight of a new morning, trudges barefoot and naked through the snow thinking that really he ought to be somewhat indignant at being treated like this. The red-haired boy trails at his heels, none too pleased himself, hopping about in the snow and making little hissing sounds of displeasure. Fortunately there's hardly anyone about at this hour of the morning, and no one sees the gentleman usher his two slaves through a door and up a flight of steps to a dingy parlor and then down a dimly lit hallway to a small room containing a bed and a lamp and very little else.

"So then, boys, let's get to it." The man takes off his overcoat and unbuckles his belt. He removes his trousers and vest and stands there in his shirt, and now, oddly, Ivy does recognize him, he's a former suitor of the woman who was his mistress when he was a small boy; the woman who'd owned Cinnamon, his mother. "You know, Ivy, you were such a pretty child. Shame you turned out to be such an odd-looking man, but I must say that your mouth at least is beyond reproach." Ivy tries not to show his annoyance at this; he dislikes having his mouth fucked, has always found it unpleasant.

"Kneel for me, there's a good lad." Ivy kneels, and once again finds an unwelcome and not particularly clean cock thrust into his mouth. He does his level best to keep himself from gagging and to keep looking up at the man fucking him, but his eyes keep straying to the red-haired boy where he stands forlorn and shivering in the corner, both arms wrapped tight around his body.

“Arms behind your back," the man says, and Ivy obeys, but the man slaps him across the face anyway and Ivy backs hastily off his cock, as he was trained to do in the event of such a firm correction. "Didn't tell you to stop sucking, boy."

"Sir, if you--" As before, it's no use trying to explain. The man hits Ivy again, and this time the heavy jeweled ring on his hand catches on Ivy's lower lip and tears it. He turns his head and presses his face to his shoulder to stem the bleeding, but the man redirects his attention with a series of swats and jabs with his walking stick which he's taken in hand once more.

"Stop it." Ivy realizes that the redheaded boy has spoken up. He steps forward with his arms still crossed on his chest and his head raised defiantly and for the first time Ivy sees that he really is somewhat attractive despite his youth and scrawniness.

"Leave him alone. I'll suck your cock for you."

"You, little one... Your lips are too thin, I'm afraid." the man sits on the edge of his bed, legs spread, half hard cock displayed. "Come here, it's your arse that I want." Ivy crouches, the back of his hand held to his bleeding mouth, and watches as the boy mounts the man's lap, grasps and coaxes his cock into position and sinks down on it slowly.

–

Ivy curls up in his corner as before, cold hard earth and slabbed stone, the damp smell of mildew and dust. Facing the wall, his head tucked snugly under his arm, but he finds that he can't sleep. He's cold, bitterly cold, shivering no matter how he tries to school himself into absolute stillness, to give no sign of his discomfort, even though no one is here to see him but the other two slaves, old Hawkes and the boy, Dane, who now sits with his back against the wall and his hands on his knees and his quick blue eyes are slyly watching Ivy, following his restless twitching and heaving.

Suddenly Ivy can't bear that he's being watched like this, that he has to endure the indignity of being gawked at by a callow boy who barely has hair on his chest on top of everything else he's already suffered. He turns his head in Dane's direction and gives him what he hopes is a withering look, and when that doesn't seem to get his point across, actually addresses him.

“You,” he snaps. “What are you staring at?”

“I wasn't. I mean, I was, I was looking at you, I'm sorry.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing. I mean, don't feel like you owe me anything for what I did, because I was happy to do it. I did it because I wanted to. No skin off my nose or anything.”

“All right.”

“You can't sleep, can you?” Ivy doesn't reply, only shrugs, but part of him wants to admit how miserable he is, to beg this boy for whatever he can offer, for the smallest consolation; a word, a touch, some kind of acknowledgment, but Ivy is a good slave, strong and obedient and well-trained and determined above all to keep what remains of his dignity.

“I see you shivering. You're cold.”

“Of course I am,” Ivy replies, and once more it sounds a great deal more snappish than he'd meant.

“It'll be warmer if we lie next to each other.” Ivy hears the boy's light footsteps on the floor, then feels his kneeling presence beside him, a hand resting on his shoulder. “We had to do this where I was before. In prison. Not enough blankets to go around, but at least we had clothes there.” Ivy feels that slim harmless body stretch out beside his, the boy's chest pressed lightly to his back, the boy's arm draped over his side. His skin is warm, and it feels smooth and soft against Ivy's. He's not shivering, and after a while Ivy feels his own shivers subside, warmth seeping from one relaxed body to the other, warmth shared between them and keeping them from subsiding into torpor.

“That's warmer,” Dane says. “Isn't it?”

“Hmm.”

“Goodnight.” Ivy feels Dane shift against him, an elbow lightly jabbing his ribs, the point of one knee poking into the back of his thigh. Eventually all their bones come to rest in complementary positions, nestled snugly against each other. Dane's head is pillowed on Ivy's shoulder, his breath a constant and not-unpleasant warmth on Ivy's neck.

Ivy wakes once or twice during the night, each time somewhat confused as to what this boy's warm body is doing wrapped around his, but he reminds himself that it's only to keep the cold at bay and goes back to sleep. He sleeps lightly enough, dreams very little, wakes sharp and refreshed and most of all warm the next morning. Dane is still lying on him, breathing on his neck, clutching Ivy with both arms as if he's clinging to the side of a cliff.

“Wake up,” Ivy mutters, shoving at him lightly. “You can let go of me now.”

“I'm still cold. You're warm.”

“Fancy that.” Ivy sits up, his back to the bare freezing stone-slab wall. “Go roll around with him if you're so cold.” Hawkes, of course, his kindling-wood bones piled in their own corner, weathered skin stretched taut over them. Poor Hawkes; Ivy and Dane, in spite of their other deficiencies, are at least relatively young, with many more years of use to be gotten out of them. There again, that might not be to their advantage.

“He's not as handsome as you are.”

“I'm not handsome.”

“Maybe you're not.” Dane looks up at Ivy, smiles with engagingly crooked teeth. “I like the way you look, though. Your face and everything. The old man said you're odd-looking, and he was right, but he made it sound like an insult, and it shouldn't be, really.”

“You talk too much.”

“Not much else to do here really, is there? We might as well get to know each other.”

“I don't wish to know you.”

“Come on, old man. We've already slept together, haven't we?”

“You're a criminal. I don't associate with criminals.” Dane looks mulish for a moment, then laughs softly, showing all his teeth again. Crooked, narrow, with especially pointed canines that give him the look of a clever little fox or wild dog, something born to seize other animals by the neck and shake the life out of them.

“You don't even know what I've done.”

“You've done something to deserve that mark. That's all I need to know.”

“You don't know that I deserve it.”

“I'm not interested either way.”

“All right. Suits me fine.” Dane straightens himself, sits up against the wall, both arms strapped across his chest. He looks as though he's playacting being colder than he is, trying to get Ivy to have pity on him, but Ivy curls up in his corner and ignores him. Hawkes wakes up, and in short order he and Dane are conversing like the oldest of friends. Ivy ignores both of them, closes his eyes and drifts into half-sleep as their mismatched voices babble on.

It's late afternoon before the door opens again, and when it does another new arrival is hustled into the room, this time with considerably more care than Dane's handlers showed when they threw him over the threshold. It's plain to see why: she's a pregnant woman, six or seven months along, with a great round belly and heavy swollen tits resting atop it. She covers her face, kneeling with her back to the wall, and Ivy hears the muffled sound of sobs. It pains his heart to see a woman so ill-used; perhaps this one is a broodmare like his mother, but if so, what is she doing here? She should have a devoted master or mistress to care for her through the trying process of pregnancy and birth, like Cinnamon had all those years ago.

Ivy sits, and watches, and waits, and at length makes up his mind that he should comfort the woman, but just as he's about to stand Hawkes does instead, and crouches down by her side, and places a crooked old hand on her shoulder. She lowers her hands and looks up at him, teary-eyed, and Ivy sees that she's not a woman at all. Her eyes are big and soft and dark, but her nose is far too wide and bony, her chin too strong, her jaw too square. This one is as much a man as he and Hawkes and Dane, but happens to have a cunt, and when a slave has a cunt there's always the danger of it being filled with some man's unwanted seed. It must be a great trial, Ivy thinks, to be taken for what you're not. However else he's suffered since coming down in the world, at least he's never been forced to carry and bear children.

“Now then, dear,” Hawkes is saying. “That's enough of that. Don't cry, don't cry, it's all right.” The pregnant boy sniffles and wipes his nose on his arm and glances over at Ivy fearfully, and Hawkes shushes him again. “That's Ivy over there. He's a lovely fellow, you know, gentle as the day, wouldn't harm a fly. And the redheaded lad, he's a good sort as well. You're all right here with us. Don't cry now.”

“What's going to happen to us?” the boy says. “What is this place? What's it all for? I thought I was being discarded. I thought...”

“Thought you'd been thrown to the wolves, eh?” Hawkes laughs, and the boy looks mildly alarmed, big damp eyes flickering over to rest on Ivy, then Dane, then back to Hawkes. “We're just common curs. Ownerless dogs, like you. What's your name, dear?”

“Charlie.” He swallows, blinks, clears his throat. “Charlie Tillotson. I used to live down in the hollow. Down the river, near the green hills.”

“Pleased to meet you, Charlie. I'm Brewerton Hawkes, he's Ivy, and the little one there is Dane.”

“Pleased to meet you. I guess.”

Ivy doesn't come forward, doesn't offer his hand in fellowship, but he keeps his eye on the new arrival as he settles in, notices that Charlie looks at him more frequently than he judges to be polite. Even people who note Ivy's failure to be handsome usually have the decency not to stare.

Evening turns to night, and the four slaves scrabble for their cheerless evening meal, tossed onto the floor of the cell in a cloth bag: apples, stale bread, a few gristly fragments of meat that aren't quite spoiled. Hawkes suggests they reserve most of it for Charlie, due to his delicate condition, and Ivy doesn't have it in him to argue. Again he remembers his mother, and his heart softens toward this poor little pregnant creature, already gone rickety in the limbs and gaunt in the face, undernourished and neglected. Charlie eats very little, refuses Hawkes' largess with what to Ivy seems peculiar grace, considering his position.

“I throw everything up anyway,” he says, and Hawkes clucks sympathetically and sets his few remaining teeth to grinding up an apple. Ivy lies in his corner and listens, and he doesn't protest when Dane comes to him again and rests an arm around him. On Dane's other side is Charlie, and then Hawkes, the four of them heaped together in a loose bundle, sharing what body heat they can muster. Dane is sharp and bony and fidgety but warm. Both Hawkes and Charlie snore, but the sound is low and rhythmic and almost pleasant.

Days pass, days of huddling miserably in the freezing cold cell and fighting for barely adequate portions of scarcely edible food and piling against his fellow inmates at night, and gradually Ivy comes to realize what sort of place he's ended up in now that his working life is almost over. It's like a very low-rent brothel, and there are men who buy up worn-out slaves and dump them off at these places where they're kept until they've outlived their usefulness and then they're replaced by another lot of discards. It's legal, he gathers, but frowned upon, and it's at least somewhat comforting that these places are often targeted by abolitionists.

“They have to get it out of us,” Charlie, the former broodmare, tells him one day. “They have to use us as much as we can be used, or we aren't worth the money they paid.”

“I know I'm not worth what the peddler took for me. It doesn't matter. I was ruined in the prime of my youth and strength and it's not up to me whether I deserve a peaceful retirement.”

“You do.” Charlie touches his arm, tentatively, glancing up at him with something like admiration in his wet brown eyes. “You do deserve it. A good guy like you. I've never been as good as you are.”

“Weren't you a good broodmare?” Ivy supposes that was a joke, albeit a very weak one. He touches Charlie's shoulder, and Charlie's looking down at his own tits- little things, but round and lush and fleshy, like small ripe plums-- as if he wants Ivy to touch them too. Ivy feels a phantom sensation of yearning in his missing arm, recalls what it felt like to grasp a woman's tits with both hands, press them tightly, mound them together, push his cock between them, and he touches Charlie as lightly and harmlessly as he can. He cups one soft breast in his hand, squeezes when Charlie grunts encouragingly. Charlie grasps Ivy's shoulders, presses his cheek against Ivy's chest.

“I can't breed you. You're in foal already.”

“I don't want you to breed me.” Charlie's hands are hesitant and trembling but he knows what he's looking for and what to do with it when he finds it. “You have a pretty big cock, you know.”

“Do you...” It's been such a long time since Ivy's had a woman, or a man, and he's never mated with a pregnant broodmare. That sort of thing wouldn't have been allowed in any of the households where he'd served, but now that he doesn't have to concern himself with propriety anymore, he might as well fuck the rather nice-looking boy who's currently stroking his dick.

“How do you do it?” he asks Charlie. “Can you lie on your back?”

“I can't. It's too heavy.” Charlie lies down on his side and Ivy rubs against him, his cock nudging up under Charlie's belly and pressing between his thighs. Charlie lifts one leg, and Ivy gets into his pussy from behind, feels as if he's going to come almost immediately just from the heat of it, the sudden and welcome sensation of glorious warmth surrounding his neglected flesh.

Then, at this inopportune moment, the door opens and Ivy's old acquaintance from the house of his first mistress enters the room stomping snow from his boots; he takes in the scene before him and lets out a bellowing laugh, hunched over with hilarity, leaning on the wall to keep himself upright.

“Look at this, will you! Well, I suppose the brute couldn't help himself. Who's that poor skinny thing, Ivy? Has she got a nice little wet cunt for you, my boy?” Ivy hastily withdraws himself from Charlie and kneels on the floor beside him, and Charlie's trying to scramble to his feet but he can't quite manage it and he keeps fending off Ivy's attempts to help him, and all the while the old gentleman is laughing as if he's never seen anything more incredible in his life.

“Come with me, then,” he says. “The two of you. We'll sort this out together.” Ivy finally manages to drag Charlie to his feet, and they both follow the old man out into the snowy streets. The snow is up to their ankles, with drifts piled high against the walls of the buildings and more billowing out of the sky, but their exposure to the storm is mercifully brief. In a rented room with the curtains drawn and a fire crackling in the grate, Ivy sits naked on the unmade bed and waits for someone to join him. Charlie is taken with the fire, drops promptly to his knees beside it and crouches there warming his hands, his poor thin body with the obscenely bulging pregnant belly shaking and shivering as if it'll never stop.

“A broodmare,” says the old man. “You don't often see them discarded.”

“It's true.” Ivy wonders if Charlie would have been spared this fate had he been a woman, or at least playacted at being one, though he can't imagine the particulars of Charlie's identity would have mattered much to his owners as long as he kept quiet and did as he was told. Perhaps he had rebelled in some way, been pushed to the brink of his endurance by all the surely clumsy and unwanted impregnation sex. Not all broodmares, Ivy knows, are treated as well as his own mother was.

“What do you think, Ivy? Get on her, boy, finish what you started.”

“Him.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Him. Charlie. He's a boy.”

“A boy? With that big belly and that pretty little cunt?” The gentleman laughs again, and Ivy moves to stand beside Charlie, shielding his body from view, and, not incidentally, feeling the fire's all-healing warmth on the backs of his legs. It's been so long since he's been properly warm that he feels as if the relief might actually kill him.

“Male broodmares aren't unknown.”

“Well, male or female or whatever that creature is, you ought to get back on it and start rutting before I lose my patience.”

“No.” Charlie's looking up at them now, raising himself on his knees, reaching out to clutch at Ivy's hips, and Ivy turns to face him. He offers his hand, which, strangely enough, Charlie takes in both of his and kisses.

“I'm going to suck your cock first,” he says, and Ivy stiffens automatically, allows Charlie to position him as he pleases; Charlie nudges his legs apart and kneels between them, and arranges Ivy's hand in his own hair. He closes his eyes and parts his lips and slides them around the head of Ivy's cock with practiced ease, breathing serenely through his nose as he accepts more and more of the stiffening length into his throat. Both Ivy and the gentleman are caught off guard, too taken aback to protest, and at any rate Charlie's cocksucking prowess is beautiful to behold. He grasps Ivy's hips almost tenderly, sucks with a steady rhythm and little encouraging flicks of his tongue, and Ivy remembers as well, though it's been so long since anyone's offered their mouth to him.

“Pull out of his mouth and come on his tits,” the old man suggests, and to Ivy, so close to climaxing, this seems like the most brilliant idea anyone's ever had. Grasping Charlie by the nape of his neck, he pries the boy off of him, his pursed lips coming loose with a loud wet pop. Ivy reaches down and strokes himself, once, and in a surge of white-hot bliss he spatters Charlie's tits with his release. Thus anointed, Charlie looks strangely sheepish, as if he's ashamed to have been given exactly what he wants.

“Well, that was something. I'd say he's done pretty well for you.”

“Sir.” Ivy kneels again, lowers his head to lick at Charlie's neck and chest, and Charlie lets out such helplessly delighted gasps that Ivy's almost hard again by the time he's cleaned up the mess he made. He sucks Charlie's nipples because they feel good and firm between his lips, and his hand slides gently down Charlie's big belly and between his legs and into the tangle of hair growing over his cunt. Obligingly, Charlie props himself up on his hands and knees, presenting his opened pussy for Ivy to examine at his leisure.

“Well, don't just stare at it.” Ivy starts; he'd almost forgotten their customer. The old man's sitting on the bed watching them keenly, hands on his knees, all his clothes still on except for his fur cloak which has fallen to the floor. Ivy picks it up and drapes it over Charlie's bare body before returning to his post. He ducks his head under the layer of fur, finds a close warm space that smells of Charlie's sweat and arousal, the moisture that slicks the hair between his legs. Charlie's still shivering, and he cries out sharply when Ivy's tongue makes contact. It's been a long time, as well, since Ivy's done this, and he relishes the firm salty fleshiness of it, Charlie's trembling legs, the heat and scent and heavy secretions of his warm and willing body.

“Come on now, I can't even see you sucking his cunt under there.” The old man pulls back the cloak far enough to reveal Ivy's face, his tongue lapping, his nose and lips all but submerged in Charlie's wetness and warmth, and Charlie makes a loud startled sound when Ivy sucks firmly at his clit, grasping him at the waist, holding him still as well as he can. Poor Charlie! Starving, cold, beaten, dragged from place to place, wearied by such a heavy and constant burden, a burden that he can't shed, all this flesh and bone and fluid that was forced on him, and now... Ivy is determined to make him come, and of course having made this resolution he's hard again himself, and he ignores the gentleman watching the two of them and plows into Charlie with all the skill and enthusiasm he's capable of, regretting that he doesn't have the use of both hands to balance himself.

When Charlie comes, he spills something warm and wet on Ivy's face which Ivy realizes isn't piss only after he's sat up and begun to wipe himself off; he licks his lips for the warm salty taste, reaches down to handle his stiffening cock. Then, with alarming suddenness, Charlie's mouth is on him, sort of noncommittally, and Ivy pushes him away, earns quite a sad-eyed look from Charlie and a dry chuckle from their still-seated audience.

“Stop, I'm going to mount you.” Charlie looks uncertain, but he lifts his head and turns and presents his cunt again and Ivy meets no resistance when he climbs on and slides into it, and as before the warmth and relief is instantaneous and he feels as if he could weep with gratitude, if he were accustomed to weeping, and laments again his lack of two good hands with which to stroke Charlie's sides and fondle his heavy hanging tits. It isn't long before he comes, and it seems to last for a long time, and he's aware of nothing-- not the past, not the future, not the man seated on the bed watching him- nothing but the warmth in his belly and the sweetness of soft skin against his and the slickness of his movements inside Charlie's cunt. Then he pulls away, panting, and he's cold again, and Charlie slouches onto his side with the fur cloak thrown over his head and he's trembling now more than ever and Ivy wonders if it's time for his foal to be born, if some of the wetness and heat inside him was the water of birth starting to break.

“If you've fucked him so hard he's gone into labor, I'll be truly impressed,” says the gentleman, apparently guessing his thoughts.

“I don't think so.” Ivy gathers up the fur again, drapes it around Charlie to cover him decently. “He's just cold and sick and tired. Broodmares aren't meant to live very long.”

“That's a shame, isn't it?”

“It is a shame, sir.”

“The poor little thing. I ought to acquire him myself, see to it that he's given a comfortable retirement.” To Ivy's ears there's something a bit ominous in that statement, but he says nothing. He has no reason to protest, either, when the gentleman announces his intentions of acquiring both Ivy and Dane for his menagerie as well.

“I am a gentleman farmer and no man of means. You poor discarded souls are all I can afford, but I suspect that all of us are the better for it.”

“Sir.”

“Slaves of your caliber can be purchased quite easily. No need for a bill of sale or indeed any documentation at all.” So it proves to be, and another bargain is made for Ivy's life, Charlie and Dane sold with him and the three of them bundled off to the old gentleman's farm within the week. They're provided with clothes for the trip, and arrive riding in a carriage like free men instead of being piled together in a livestock cart.

“You know him, don't you?” Charlie, having said nothing the entire trip, finally pipes up from under the heavy wool blanket covering him. “He was a suitor of your mistress. Isn't that what you said? Does he have a wife now? Don't you know his name, or anything else about him?”

“It was a long time ago. I was a child.” Ivy shushes Charlie, gently, stroking his hair with a hand that trembles more than he'd like. He's not a child anymore, and he shouldn't tremble and quake like one when facing uncertainty. He ought to be pleased at his good fortune, and he is of course glad to have escaped that basement room. The freezing cold, the bare stone walls, the dullness of the unchanging days, and men renting him out for a few pennies an hour as if he were some common whore. An insult to his mother's memory, he thinks. That's what it was. Cinnamon's bloodlines may not have been noble, but they were stolid and respectable. Ivy comes from a long line of good useful slaves, strong laborers, studs and broodmares with excellent conformation. Maybe now he's been granted his proper place in life, can finally live as he deserves.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: slightly implied period kink

His new master, true to his word, is not a man of means. His holdings include a few acres of tobacco and vegetable fields, a small orchard, a few paddocks running down to the banks of a slow stream fringed with birch and maple woods. There's a modest farmhouse, a yard, a stable and a henhouse. Lilac bushes, black and bare in the snow, line the well-carved path to the front door. The carriage stops, and Ivy climbs down after Dane, allowing Charlie to lean on him. He holds Charlie's elbow to steady him, handing him out of the carriage as if he were a footman and Charlie a fine lady. Charlie stumbles in the snow, nearly falls, catches Ivy's arm at the last second.

Their benefactor, whose name, as it turns out, is Everett (whether it's his first or last name isn't important, or whether he even has two names at all; perhaps he's a freed slave, or was born to a broodmare himself) shows Charlie and Ivy to a tiny room in back of the kitchen that he says they can share. There's a low bed covered with worn wool blankets, one window and very little else, but Ivy is grateful beyond words to be given such a gift. A room that he has to share with only one other person; he doesn't deserve it, would scarcely dare to dream of such extravagance. He's too overwhelmed to thank his new master, and Charlie is likewise too elated for words, or just too tired. He moves uncertainly, limbs wobbling, legs giving out entirely when he reaches the bed and when he lies down Ivy lies down beside him.

“You're right,” Everett says. “He's too weak. We'll have to start feeding him up immediately, but I'm afraid it may be too late for his foal. Your mother was a broodmare, Ivy; you know how important proper nutrition is.”

“If the foal lives, he won't be able to feed it.” Ivy touches Charlie's side, and Charlie groans quietly. His eyes are closed, and he's burrowed into the pillow underneath his head. A soft pillow, full of real feathers instead of straw, and Ivy's tired as well, his whole body trembling with exhaustion. The cold of winter has seeped beneath his skin and nestled inside his bones, and he doubts he'll ever be warm again.

“Rest here. Look after him. You'll both be fed well, provided with everything you need.” Everett gives Ivy an oddly paternal slap on the shoulder and leaves them to settle in. Ivy lies there on top of the blankets with his coat and boots still on, and Charlie likewise shows no inclination to move from where he's fallen, sprawled on his side, eyes closed, one arm thrown over his head. Charged with looking after him, Ivy doesn't really know what to do. He's seen pregnant mares before, witnessed the rituals of reproduction from breeding to birth, but as a stud he'd had very few dealings with the broodmares after his task was completed. Everett will have to send for a doctor to help Charlie, and Ivy knows it's likely that his foal will be born dead.

“Don't be afraid,” Ivy mutters. He strokes Charlie's hair, which is dull and dry, falling out in clumps. “You'll survive this. You'll be all right.”

“Why did he tell you to look after me?”

“I suppose because I'm here. Because you trust me, and we're fond of each other.”

“You are? You're fond of me?”

“Be quiet. Go to sleep and rest. You need rest.”

“Don't go anywhere.”

“Shush.” Ivy closes his eyes. The room smells sad and dusty, as if it's been shut up all winter, as if it hadn't been aired out last spring. He wonders who used to sleep here, and where they've gone.

Charlie's breathing evens out, subsides into those soft little snores Ivy remembers, and Ivy stirs enough to remove Charlie's boots from his feet and lay them aside before closing his eyes again. When he wakes in what he guesses is the middle of the night, he doesn't remember falling asleep, and he hears Charlie stirring as well, feels hands reaching out for him and clasping his arm at the wrist and pulling him closer, and Charlie's breathing in big wet gulps that almost sound like sobs.

“Shush, Charlie. What is it? Is your foal ready now? Are you in pain?”

“Here.” Charlie's voice is a hoarse whisper, hot on Ivy's neck, and his skin feels feverish where it touches Ivy's and Ivy's hand is now wedged between Charlie's thighs with his open cunt rubbing against it and he's as wet as he was when he had Ivy's tongue in him and his breathing sounds more like gasps now.

“Here, quick, make me come, please...”

“What's wrong with you? Go back to sleep.” Ivy's fingers obey Charlie's frantic directives, pressing and stroking inside his cunt, massaging the warm firm walls of his passage but Charlie's still snorting like a mare in heat and very deliberately he raises himself up on his elbows and knees and thrusts himself at Ivy like he wants to be mounted and if Ivy refuses he'll just find the nearest hard cylindrical object and rut on that until he's exhausted.

“I can't sleep now. Please, I need to come, it hurts too much...”

“All right, all right, hold still and stop making that noise.” Charlie gulps, chokes delicately with the effort of keeping his breathing under control, and Ivy raises himself wearily into a crouching position, all the joints of his skeleton creaking in protest, everything inside him cold and lacking sufficient lubrication. Charlie has more than enough, however, and his cunt takes Ivy in hungrily, almost as if it were a throat or the yawning mouth of one of those snakes that swallows its prey whole. Ivy's cock is longer than most and gets very thick when it's hard but Charlie wants even more length and girth than Ivy can give him and his straining thighs push back against Ivy's and the familiar slick warm substance that lubricates his cunt pours from him when he comes. Ivy doesn't come inside him but pulls out and rubs against Charlie's side, the great firm mound of his pregnant belly, and he's thinking of the stud who must have fucked Charlie, who knows who he was or what he looked like or even if he enjoyed the task of filling Charlie's cunt with his seed but he'd succeeded in continuing his line just like Ivy has and Charlie has no choice but to carry his foal.

“There. Can you sleep now?” There's no answer, because Charlie is already snoring, and Ivy kicks his boots off and crawls under the layers of blankets and before very long he's fallen asleep as well. He wakes late the next morning, luxuriating in warmth, wool and feathers and the captured body heat of Charlie who's still blissfully asleep beside him. So strange, Ivy thinks, that he could go from shivering naked on the floor of a damp basement to lounging in such a soft and comfortable bed. He wonders if Everett might allow his slaves to bathe in a real tub, to soak in warm water and soapy lather and fall asleep leaning against the smooth steep porcelain sides, nothing but warmth and softness and sweet-smelling water, and Ivy's known of broodmares who preferred to have their foals while lying in a bath and he wonders if that might help Charlie to bring his forth. He turns on his side, studies Charlie's sleeping face, finds it not unpleasant to look at. Charlie isn't odd like him, but he isn't sharp-pointed and clever-looking like Dane either. His nose is big and blunt, his cheekbones broad, his eyes deeply recessed into their sockets. He has a cluster of dark moles on his left cheek just under his eye, and his chin is covered with small bristly hairs. His mouth isn't especially full or sweet but it isn't thin and sharp like Dane's, and his lips are parted slightly, showing chipped front teeth and one canine that's practically worn down to nothing.

Ivy's made something of a habit of studying people closely over the years; it's a sort of game he plays, matching features to each other, fixing them in his memory. It's made his boring life a bit more interesting; not that he dislikes leading a boring life, quite the contrary, he'd much preferred the stagnant contentedness of his previous life with his old mistress to being dragged around naked in the snow and beaten with sticks and forced to suck the cocks of old and unappealing men. Charlie isn't either of those things, and Ivy has to admit he's enjoyed their association thus far. Looking at Charlie's sleeping face fills Ivy with something uncomfortably like tenderness, and he almost wants to kiss him, though kissing is another thing he generally disdains.

Charlie is much too feverish with foal-carrying to give a damn whether Ivy kisses him or not, and anyway he seems to prefer being mounted from behind, though he does enjoy Ivy nibbling his neck while fucking him in that position. He requires it several times a day and at least once a night, and he's still not eating as much as he needs to put on weight and Ivy is afraid he's running too hot and he'll burn himself out. One of them has to burn out sooner or later, and Ivy doesn't complain but keeps servicing Charlie with nearly as much stamina as he'd possessed in his younger days standing at stud.

Everett doesn't appear often and hasn't touched either of them since their arrival, but Dane becomes a fixture in the small bedroom, showing up damp and smelling of goat's milk soap in the evenings after his chores are done. He climbs on Charlie as well, mounts him as best he can, though Charlie generally prefers Ivy's wealth of experience and much larger cock. Dane talks to Charlie, flirts and flatters and jokes and laughs, and he talks to Charlie's foal as well, stroking the distended belly and telling it of all the grand things there are to see in the world it'll soon be born into.

Ivy tells him he's being stupid, that whatever's inside Charlie can't possibly be viable after all he's suffered, but Dane just shrugs and smiles and respectfully disagrees and carries on as he always does, and Ivy doesn't ask what it is he does all day in the fields and paddocks and outbuildings but he's privately grateful that Everett doesn't require anything of him but tending to Charlie.

So the remaining months of winter pass, strangely and solemnly, blowing snow and ice raining from the sky and then the long days of grayish melting slush before the first flowers of spring can part the soil, and Everett sends for a doctor to help Charlie bring his foal into the world. Charlie's been bedridden for days trying to bring it forth, and Ivy would never admit it but he fears for Charlie now, fears that he's been bred too often and this last birth will take all the strength he has left. Charlie's been moved into Everett's bed for the occasion, his wrists and ankles lashed to the bedposts with strong rope. He appears to be delirious, his head rolling from side to side, his mouth twitching with inaudible muttering, his eyes flicking restlessly around the room. Dane is here, Everett is here, the other slaves of the household are standing by as well, and Ivy's sitting at Charlie's side, afraid to touch him. The doctor crouches between his strapped-apart legs and reaches inside him like a farmer pulling a calf. Charlie howls in pain, trembles and thrashes and bucks but can't break free of the ropes holding him fast.

“I just have to reposition it,” the doctor's saying. “He has a bit of a tilt to his pelvis, which makes things a little more difficult.” His gloved hands are covered in blood and a mucousy yellow substance like a caul, and Dane's holding a hand to his mouth like he's going to vomit and old Everett looks a little green but Ivy just keeps sitting there with his hand on Charlie's shoulder feeling his sweat and panic and the frantic vibrations of his breath as it heaves in and out.

“Can you get the foal out?” Ivy says. “Can you feel it? Is it alive?”

“It's coming out. Good boy, good boy, be quiet now, you're doing so well...” More wails and yelps from Charlie, who by now doesn't look as if he even remembers where he is or recognizes anyone who's there with him. There's foam on his lips and a look in his eye that Ivy's only seen before in butchered animals, but then abruptly he falls silent and the doctor pulls a squalling infant from between his legs. It's filthy with blood, of course, and appears somewhat squashed and battered but it's a foal and it sounds like a healthy one.

“A girl,” the doctor announces. He wraps the foal in a clean cloth and hands it to Everett. Charlie's chest is still heaving, his breath escaping him in pained whimpers. Dane mops his forehead with a wet rag. Ivy's still gripping his shoulder, reluctant to let go even though the worst is over now. The doctor strips off his gloves and starts pulling an assortment of vials and needles from his bag. “He'll need just a few stitches now. There was some minor tearing, a bit of damage, nothing to worry about really.”

Everett leaves the room, taking Charlie's foal and the two female slaves with him. One or both of them will wet-nurse the infant, as Charlie himself is still too undernourished to lactate. Ivy watches in stunned fascination as the doctor takes a needle and stiff thread and sews up Charlie's ripped flesh. Charlie is dull-eyed and unmoving, doesn't even cry out when the needle pierces him, or when the doctor plunges a syringe full of something thick and sinister-looking into his thigh. The doctor takes a basin of water and a cloth and mops up the last of the dried blood. He packs his things away and Dane gets up to see him to the door, leaving Ivy alone with Charlie, who still isn't quite conscious.

Ivy pulls back the stained sheet and crawls underneath next to Charlie, because he doesn't know what else to do. Charlie is trembling all over, everything shaking, all his bones knocking together, even his teeth chattering. Ivy nuzzles in close to him as if they were in their own bed, as if this were an ordinary morning.

“He won't know you for a while. Best to leave him alone for now.” Dane has returned, is sitting at the foot of the bed looking nearly as sad and unnerved as Ivy feels. “He'll live. He needs to rest.”

“What about the foal?”

“It doesn't belong to him. He can't feed it, or raise it. Master will take care of it until it's sold.”

“Broodmares need to nurture their foals. Name them, nurse them, show them that they're loved. Otherwise how will they grow strong enough to become decent slaves? Any newborn creature will languish without its mother's love.”

“That's the way you were raised. Not all slaves are the same.” Dane climbs into bed on Charlie's other side, lays a protective arm around him. “Not all slaves have mothers. Not all free men have mothers.” Ivy's forced to concede the point, and for a long time the three of them lie there without moving much or saying anything, just as they had in the basement room where they met. Charlie's trials are over now, but Ivy can't bring himself to feel anything like relief. He finds it hard to believe that Everett has any use for a worn-out broodmare, one that's too sick and weary to ever foal again. Charlie might make him a decent bedwarmer, but Ivy doesn't want to imagine that.

Ivy knows that Dane is an orphan, that he was put in prison for thieving and then sold as a slave, as petty criminals often are when prisons become overcrowded. What he doesn't know is where Dane comes from, whether he has any memory of his mother and father, where he had gone in the ten years he spent evading the law and sleeping rough and associating with abolitionists and other disreputable sorts of people. Dane is a little too proud for a slave, holds his head a little too high, speaks a little too firmly, isn't afraid to look into the eyes of free men.

Charlie wakes suddenly, trembling and calling out, howling with the pain in his guts, and Ivy comforts him as best he can. Dane returns to his work, and Ivy doesn't know how long he and Charlie will be allowed to lie in the master's bed like this. He knows Charlie shouldn't be moved now, that he's weak from losing blood and ought to be able to rest as long as he likes. He talks to Charlie, gently and slowly, tries to murmur and shush like his own mother had when he was sick in bed, even tries to sing a bit of a song he remembers from long long ago even though his voice is thick and heavy and graceless. He isn't quite sure Charlie knows him. There's a bottle of dark medicine on the table beside the bed, and Ivy coaxes him to swallow a spoonful.

“Is that you? Ivy?” Charlie lies on his side, twitching like he wants to move, to lift his arms, to embrace Ivy but he can't reach that far even though they're lying in the same bed. His eyes are closed, similarly resisting his attempts to open them, the lids twitching visibly, the dark lashes wet with tears. “It hurts. Is anyone there? My cunt hurts, I've been ripped in half, someone help me...”

“Shush. You're all right.” Muttering and shushing, soothing Charlie as well as he can, and Ivy leans closer to him and nuzzles his damp hair and tells him to stop crying, repeats it, murmurs over and over again the same words and imagines them woven together into a rope that Charlie can grasp, sees Charlie pulling himself along it hand over hand. As long as Ivy's holding it, hanging onto the other end of that anchoring line, Charlie won't be lost.

“I'm here. We've been here the whole time, me and Dane, he's gone now but I'm still here. And your foal, you brought your foal into the world and it's healthy and lovely and you'll be bred up and full again soon.”

“That's not true. I can't carry anymore, my cunt's ripped in half.”

“Don't say that.” Ivy strokes Charlie's hair, lifts it away from his sweaty neck, feels the individual strands mold together and peel apart like the fibers of a bird's feathers. “You need to rest. Some rest and then you'll be all right. Ready to carry again, you can have any stud you want...”

“You.”

“I'm not a stud. I haven't been used for that purpose in many years.”

“I won't carry another foal. But if I do, you're the one that's going to sire it on me.”

“Charlie, stop. Be quiet. Rest.” Ivy thinks, guiltily, of Charlie's stomach. The empty space inside him begging to be filled with offspring. His torn flesh, his blood, his big dark eyes and gentle voice. Charlie deserves better than this, deserves better than to carry foals for men who'll never know them.

“I'm glad it's gone,” Charlie says. “I'm glad it's been taken from me. There's nothing inside me now.” Ivy keeps shushing him, and stroking him, and he even nurses a little on Charlie's tits which are hot and throbbing but empty and no matter how he licks and sucks and prods at the nipples with his tongue he can't get them to produce a single drop. Charlie appreciates his efforts though, and before long he settles down to sleep with his head on Ivy's shoulder and Ivy rests his arm around Charlie and holds him gently and wonders what will become of his foal. A little redheaded girl; whoever she grows up to be, she won't know that Charlie bore her. She'll be sold, most likely, as soon as she's weaned, and none of them will ever see her again.

Charlie is permitted to sleep in the master's bed for the duration of his recovery, and Dane shares Ivy's in his place. They roll around together, share certain social niceties common among household slaves who get on well with each other. Ivy even sucks Dane's cock, on occasion, having very efficiently trained the boy not to hold his head and fuck his face. He hadn't meant to draw blood, but either way a single firm bite made his displeasure more than clear. After a time, however, Ivy starts to feel as if keeping Dane company and helping to relax and restore him after a long day of labor in the fields is the only thing he's good for. Everett hasn't touched him in months, and he seldom sees Charlie, who remains bedridden for nearly two weeks.

Then Dane is banished back to his mat in the hayloft and Charlie returns to the bed he'd shared with Ivy, his tits and belly no longer swollen but slack and soft, everything about him diminished and emptied. He allows Ivy to touch him, to feel his shrunken tits and bony sides and the ridge of scar tissue between his legs. The place where his cunt was sewn back together feels odd, but fully healed, and Charlie doesn't object to Ivy lingering there, rubbing his fingertips over it. He licks Charlie's cunt, and Charlie encourages it but no longer comes in torrents, no longer lifts his hips and squirms and begs the way he did when he was pregnant.

“Do you remember it?” Charlie asks him one night in bed, an unseasonably warm spring night with a full honeyed moon that reminds Ivy of a broodmare's great round belly. “Do you remember when I had my foal? You saw everything, didn't you?”

“Don't you remember? It wasn't so long ago.”

“I don't remember very much. He gave me drugs, so it wouldn't hurt, but I know it still hurt.”

“You kept crying. You had to be tied down because you were rolling around so much. So you didn't hurt yourself or the foal. The doctor pulled her out of you, and you kept trying to kick him.”

“You were there.” Charlie's eyes are closed, and he's muttering vaguely like he does when he's falling asleep. “I'm glad you were there.” He reaches out with one hand and strokes Ivy's hair away from his face, and Ivy doesn't shy from the touch. He's become somewhat used to the affection and admiration of Dane and Charlie, allows them to fawn over him and call him handsome and striking and lovely and even almost believes them from time to time. He allows Charlie to kiss him, which pleases him greatly; broodmares don't typically enjoy such privileges. Charlie's become quite petted and spoiled, which suits Ivy. He's offered whatever he wants to eat, and finally, now late in the month of April, seems to be putting on weight, though he's still far too skinny and shaky to be bred again in Ivy's opinion.

That's why it's odd when Everett approaches Ivy with the first orders he's given him in months. It's afternoon and Ivy is in his room napping and Everett enters without knocking and wakes him from a dream of his childhood, of standing knee-deep in cold mud and river water and watching tiny yellow-finned fish flicker among the branches of a sunken tree. Ivy swims up towards wakefulness, scrambles out of bed and kneels hastily but gracefully in front of his master.

“You're a good lad, Ivy. You've done very well these past weeks. Kept Charlie happy, he looks very plump and fertile these days. I think it's time we bred him again, don't you?” Everett idly strokes Ivy's cheek, which is stubbled with a light growth of hair he's neglected to shave. “You're willing to stand at stud again, aren't you? Put your seed into that cunt, watch it grow into something beautiful.”

“Sir.” Ivy shifts a little uncomfortably on the scratchy carpet under his knees, and Everett as always has no trouble interpreting his body language.

“You look like you wish to register some objection. It's all right with me, boy, speak if you will.” Everett has proved to be even-tempered and reasonable, has been good and even kind to Ivy and Charlie and Dane through their months of belonging to him. By all rights, Ivy shouldn't be afraid to speak his mind now, but he is.

“Sir. My master, I wonder... it's only that I don't think he ought to be bred now. He's not vigorous enough. He had such a difficult time with the last foal, he ought to be allowed to rest.”

“I'm afraid that's not possible. I've already promised a new foal to a friend of mine, and he'll be quite disappointed if my broodmare doesn't deliver. I need you to breed him as quickly as you can. Tonight, Ivy, if you can manage it. I've been called upon to provide some entertainment to certain of my associates, and they'd like to see you perform.”

“There's little I can offer that will entertain any guests of yours, sir. I wasn't bred for such a thing, begging your pardon.”

“Nonsense, my boy.” Everett slaps him heartily on the back, and Ivy tries not to flinch. He keeps arguing his point for a while longer, but obviously Everett will have his way and Charlie will be bred again whether he wishes it or not, and Ivy's heart is unusually heavy as he slips into bed that night. Charlie is warm beside him, half-asleep, reaching out for him, and he grasps Ivy's wrist and presses Ivy's hand between his legs. Ivy enjoys this, Charlie's wordless begging, his gentle but urgent petitioning for Ivy's attention. He's making up for lost time, indulging in the sort of affectionate touches that were forbidden him when he was a broodmare, and Ivy takes his own pleasure in providing them. Charlie feels warm tonight, breathes rapidly, heaves his chest and shudders his little tits when Ivy opens him and strokes his cunt, and his dark eyes are half-closed and his mouth open and his tongue lolling out until Ivy kisses him. Charlie kisses like a broodmare; he's young and unpracticed, knows very little about mating beyond what he had to know in his previous life. That knowledge was forced on him, but now he can learn at his leisure.

Ivy, knowing what he knows, can't just keep lying here with Charlie and pleasuring him as if nothing's amiss. His fingers stop working, he pulls away and lifts his head and Charlie gives him such a black look that he almost wants to laugh. Ivy strokes his hip to reassure him and Charlie snorts impatiently, tries to turn and twist his body to force Ivy's hand between his legs again.

“That's enough,” Ivy tells him. “Don't do that now.”

“What's wrong? Did you forget how to get your prick hard?”

“None of that, now be quiet.” It's not like Charlie to resort to taunting him to get what he wants; it must be something he's learned from Dane, who has a great deal of knowledge about mating and has fucked his share of broodmares.

“What is it? I know it's something.”

“You're to be bred again.”

“What?”

“Everett and I spoke together and he wants me to sire a foal on you. Soon. Tomorrow night.”

“I'm not ready. I can't, I'm not... I don't have enough...” Charlie gestures to his flattened tits, his ribs, his still-protruding stomach. “I couldn't even suckle the one I had. I couldn't do that for her, and he gave her away.”

“He gave your foal away because he's your master and it belongs to him. It's nothing to do with you being unfit or weak.” Ivy lets his hand rest on Charlie's shoulder, lowers it to his collarbone, his sternum, his breast. No longer taut with fluid, but slack, relaxed, useless. A small stiff brown nipple that never suckled his offspring, and Ivy leans down and takes it in his mouth and sucks until Charlie forgets what they were arguing about.

Charlie's preoccupation, however, soon returns, and Ivy can't distract him with his hands or mouth, although he does his level best. Charlie gets cross with him eventually and turns on his side with his back to Ivy, which Ivy takes to mean that whatever further discussion might be necessary will have to wait until morning, but once again Charlie surprises him.

“It can't be tomorrow. It's impossible. I can't be bred again.”

“Charlie...”

“My monthly blood is going to start. I'll be bleeding by tomorrow, and your seed won't do any good.”

“How do you know?” Ivy doesn't know much, admittedly, about the blood that comes out of a woman's cunt every month; why it does, and what it's for, and why it means she won't be able to conceive. He's seen Charlie's before, watched Charlie insert a stiff cotton plug into himself, helped him pull the thing out once it was soaked and filthy. The smell of it is odd, but Ivy's grown used to it, is even willing to lick Charlie's cunt and taste the stuff directly from its source.

“I always know when it's going to start.”

“Very well.” Ivy closes his eyes, suddenly wanting nothing more than to sleep, to forget his discussion with Everett and Charlie being cross with him and really everything that's happened today except the early-morning peace of lying alone with Charlie in a warm bed while the world is cold outside. Nuzzling him, kissing him, waking him gently, his head between Charlie's legs, his mouth... what was it Everett had told him when they were reunited? Your mouth at least is beyond reproach. Charlie, it seems, would agree, but unlike Everett, Charlie likes his face, is always touching it and complimenting it shyly, telling Ivy how really handsome he is. Sweet of him, but Ivy learned a long time ago that it isn't his place to be handsome, that it doesn't matter if he's pleasing to the eye as long as he does what's asked of him and does it skillfully and uncomplainingly. Most men, after all, don't value a common labor slave for his pretty face.

The next morning, as forecast, Charlie has a stained rag stuffed between his legs, and he bristles and snarls when Ivy tries to touch him. Everett comes into the room after breakfast and whisks Charlie off for some secret purpose, and Ivy sits alone on his bed and imagines what it'll be like to perform for Everett's guests. None of his previous masters ever seemed to think the spectacle of mating was particularly interesting, but he's heard of some who make a kind of sport out of it, dressing their slaves up in outlandish outfits, providing breeding hobbles and other equipment to ensure the broodmare can't escape her fate. Guiltily, Ivy imagines Charlie in breeding hobbles, his face flushed and his head hung down and tears starting to prick at the corners of his eyes. Naked and strapped down, no avenue of escape.

Everett and Charlie don't return that evening, but Ivy does receive a visitor. Dane comes to his bed, flushed and damp and smelling of soap, and when he lies down Ivy can feel the heat in his body, emanating from his bones and muscles. His weariness is palpable, and though he's washed there's already a light sweat starting on his neck and under his arms, a fine fragrant saltiness that Ivy nuzzles and licks at delicately. Dane sighs, his eyes closed, his body slack and sprawled as if he might fall asleep before he gets what he crawled into Ivy's bed for.

“You work hard,” Ivy says, and feels immediately stupid. Dane is a slave, like him, and does what his master asks of him. He's young, but he's surely seen enough of the world to know that if he doesn't make a good showing he can easily be replaced by a more tractable beast of burden.

“And you, I suppose you've retired from field work.” Ivy shrugs with one shoulder, props himself up on his arm so he can watch Dane, who's resting on his back with both arms folded behind his head and looking the very picture of carefree youth, intoxicated with the blossoming of life around and within him.

“I do what's required of me. Perhaps our master will set me to some new tasks, I'm sure he doesn't want me to become bored.”

“You've earned a rest, old man. Leave it to the men with stronger backs than yours.” Dane laughs, lightly, as if he's teasing, and Ivy supposes he is but he can't always tell. The bed feels soft and wonderful underneath him, the mattress stuffed high and thick, the pillows plumped with down. He's lucky, after all, isn't he, so lucky...

Ivy sleeps, and wakes the next day, and Charlie has been returned to him. Still grousing and sniping and growling, but more or less himself, wearing loose clothes over the belt he has to wear to keep the bloody rag positioned under his cunt. He looks a little pale, sometimes closes his eyes and grits his teeth for a few seconds as if weathering the battering waves of an ocean storm, letting them break full in his face, knowing they can't harm him. He's a bit snappish for the next several days, but Everett doesn't seem to mind, only praises him more effusively, strokes his hair and tells him what a good broodmare he is, how lucky he is to have Ivy be the stud to impregnate him.

“He knows I fancy you,” is how Charlie explains it, and to Ivy that still sounds odd. They're not a matched pair, nor unmatched enough for their future offspring to be interesting. “This time, at least, I'll be carrying for someone I love.”

“Love,” Ivy repeats, as if the word tastes odd in his mouth. “You've used the word too lightly. You don't really mean that you love me.”  
“It doesn't matter. If we're fond of each other, if we fuck, if we sleep in the same bed...”

“Don't be ridiculous.” Charlie's quiet after that, looking somewhat abashed, and he doesn't petition Ivy for affection but turns his back and settles down to sleep, and Ivy feels a prickle of something like guilt starting deep in his gut. He reaches out his hand, lightly touches Charlie's smooth neck just under his hair, which is untrimmed, growing shaggy, developing gentle curls.

“I am fond of you. I'm going to enjoy siring your foal.”

“It doesn't matter.” Charlie shrugs, and Ivy rolls over, closes his eyes, tries to sleep. He hears someone's light footsteps in the hall outside his room, light enough to be Dane's, and they pause by the door, but then Everett's voice rings out, gruff with laughter.

“Oh no, lovely, don't wake them up. You'll do for me, now come back here, won't you?”

Ivy slips out of bed as quietly as he can and crosses the room to stand at the door, listening. Everett whispers something, and he hears Dane laugh, and he opens the door and there are the two of them standing there, Everett in his nightshirt and nothing else and Dane wearing a very strange sort of costume. He has a whaleboned corset strapped tight around his narrow waist, and the boning stops just beneath his chest, which is enhanced by a gauzy band of purple fabric that can't really be called a shirt. He's also wearing some ridiculous frilly skirt that barely skims his thighs and dark stockings pulled up almost to the skirt's hem, and a pair of women's shoes with high pointed heels all laced up with satin ribbon. His lips are painted red, and they pull away from his teeth in an almost apologetic grimace when he sees Ivy.

“Don't look so scandalized, boy.” Everett laughs again, throws one arm around Dane's shoulders and offers the other one to Ivy. “Come help me fuck this little redheaded tart, won't you? I know what she thinks of that fine cock of yours.”

“Ivy...” Dane looks as if he's going to try to offer some explanation, but in the end all he does is shake his head and bite his lip and look more ashamed than Ivy's ever seen him. He tugs at the scanty material of his skirt, trying to pull it down over his satin underpants, and Ivy can't stand to see him looking so stiff and miserable. He does want to fuck Dane, silly costume or not, though he's reluctant to leave Charlie alone in their bed. Ivy takes his master's hand and allows himself to be led to the bedroom, the same one where Charlie gave birth to his foal, likely the place where he and Ivy will make another one before very long. Ivy stands and watches as Everett throws Dane onto the bed, and he lands on his stomach with his skirt hiked up above his hips. His narrow white ass is barely concealed by a strip of dark purple satin, and oddly enough to sight makes Ivy want to slap it. Everett has the same thought; he raises one hand high in the air and brings it down hard enough to elicit a very undignified squeal of pain, and Ivy sits down on the bed next to him and offers Dane his lap to rest his head in while Everett beats his ass with methodical mercilessness.

“This is the only thing for an arse like that,” he says. “Have to roast it up, get it nice and warm before you stick your cock in. What do you think, Ivy? You can try him if you want. Go on, hit him a good hard one. That arm of yours has to be pretty strong, doesn't it?” Ivy supposes Everett is right; his remaining arm has grown stronger over the years to compensate for his loss. He raises his hand now, hesitates a moment with his arm in the air, then brings it down like a hammer, his skin striking Dane's with a magnificent smack. Dane howls and bucks and tries to escape but Everett's grabbing his arms and holding him in place and Ivy hits him again and again, finds it more satisfying than he would have thought possible.

Dane cries out each time Ivy's hand makes contact, and Ivy isn't sure he's really trying to free himself anymore, in fact it seems more like he's rutting against the mattress, his back arching, the corset laces straining, and he's short of breath now, gasping and squeaking with indignation as Ivy continues to warm his bony rump with the flat of his hand. Everett's at the head of the bed now, leaning against the headboard, lifting his nightshirt to offer Dane his cock, and Dane parts his painted lips and takes it in eagerly. His eyes are open, his brow furrowed with concentration, and Ivy marvels at how really lovely he is like this, as if he were made to please men like Everett.

“He's a bit more skilled now than he was,” Everett remarks, stroking Dane's coppery hair away from his face. It's growing longer, which suits him, and Everett hasn't insisted on having it cut; indeed, he hasn't laid down any edicts at all regarding the grooming and appearance of his slaves, which in Ivy's experience is a bit irregular. “He's learned a thing or two working on that massive piece of yours, hasn't he?”

“I suppose.” Ivy pulls down Dane's skirt and plucks at his underthings until his ass is bared, the formerly pale skin flaming with bruises, and he strokes and kneads it for a while, enjoying the feel of the nicely warmed flesh against his skin. He presses a fingertip gently against Dane's hole and finds him already stretched and lubricated, and it's the work of a moment to sink his cock into the tight well-prepared passage. Ivy grasps Dane's hip and begins to thrust in his lopsided way, pauses to step out of his pajama trousers when they tangle around his ankles. He's aware of Everett's eyes on him, coolly evaluating, even as Dane works over his master's cock. The poor boy; he's doing the best he can, and Everett's hardly paying him any mind. The flush in his cheeks is almost as deep as the crimson color of his beaten ass, and he's started to pant and gasp for breath; Ivy supposes he can't breathe very deeply, hunched over in that position with the corset restricting the expansion of his chest.

“Tell me, Ivy, which do you prefer, that lovely hole or your little broodmare's nice wet cunt?” Everett still has a hand in Dane's hair, keeps tugging at it gently to spur him on. “They're both fine acquisitions, to be sure, not as well-bred as you are but they do earn their keep, don't they?” Ivy only grunts in reply, can do little else with his cock sliding in and out of Dane's slick hole while the boy thrusts and writhes against him, doing his level best to please both of the men fucking him.

“Good boy,” Everett tells him. “Good little slut, aren't you, such a lovely little thing, taking your master's cock like that...”

Ivy comes before his master does, and he keeps thrusting automatically as his cock softens, as Dane continues to push back against him, and he almost feels as if he could get hard again watching Dane wrap his lips around Everett's cock, but he's not as young as he once was and he's already having trouble catching his breath. His wind is no good, he knows, and Dane's will soon be ruined as well if someone doesn't get that tight whalebone cage off his chest. Everett comes, loudly, pulling at Dane's hair, withdrawing slightly so his release spatters over the boy's lips and chin, and Dane collapses to the mattress with a sigh, his own cock untouched and straining against his belly.

“You've done well tonight,” Everett tells him. “Go get undressed. You can sleep with Ivy and his broodmare.” Dane nods, looking somewhat vacant, his eyes especially pale and empty in the glow of the bedside lamp. Ivy unhooks the corset and peels it away from him; by now all the rest of his finery has been torn off and tossed aside, and the two of them return naked to the bed Ivy shares with Charlie. He's already asleep, lying there on his back, soft and defenseless with his tits slumped to either side.

“You don't mind it, do you?” Dane asks; his voice scarcely a whisper, much softer and lower than Charlie's snores.

“Mind what?”

“Having me here. Letting me sleep with you.”

“Why should I mind it?”

“I just thought, you know, you and Charlie...”

“He's not my wife.” Ivy shrugs, burrows deeper into the bedclothes, nuzzles Charlie's neck and hears him mutter something in his sleep. The scent of his skin is familiar, comforting, warm and peaceful. Dane lies on his side, his arms wrapped around himself, on the edge of their pool of combined body heat and after a while Ivy realizes he's shivering.

“You don't like it,” Ivy says. “Providing service to our master.”

“Of course I don't. Do you?”

“I'm glad to be useful. To have services to perform.”

“Easy enough, for you.” Dane snorts, then sighs again, then makes a noise that sounds very much like a sob. He's young, Ivy reminds himself, such a young boy and unaccustomed to being a slave. It's all very well for him to feel hard done by, to dislike the way that Everett treats him. He wasn't born to the life, but he'll learn.

“Here.” Ivy slides his hand gently over Dane's hip and between his legs, grasps his cock like he's holding some small fragile live thing he doesn't want to suffocate. He rubs his thumb against the head, feels moisture already gathering there, and Dane makes more involuntary noises and leans back against Ivy's chest. Ivy wants to reassure him with gentle words, to tell him that it's perfectly all right to dislike being used so callously, but he doesn't know if he really believes that it is.

“You're still crying.”

“I'm not.” Dane's voice is muffled in the pillow, but Ivy can tell it's hoarse with misery. Dane's back and shoulders stretch, strain and heave with the great weight of his sorrows, and he cries as if he hasn't allowed himself to cry in a long long time. All the while Ivy keeps stroking him and talking to him, telling him whatever he can think of that might get his mind off his disgrace, and at some point he lets it slip that he's been asked to stand at stud again, to impregnate Charlie with his foal.

“You? He wants you to breed Charlie?” Dane sniffs, and turns restlessly onto one side and then the other, his long bare legs tangled up with Ivy's and his arms grasping and clinging to the mattress like he's afraid he might float up and away into space if he doesn't hold on tight enough. “Why wouldn't he want me?” Ivy is taken aback somewhat, this being the last reaction he expected, and he gives Dane's cock a startled and involuntary squeeze, causing him to yelp with pleasure and beg him to repeat the maneuver.

“You're a prisoner. You can't be used as breeding stock.”

“And you... you're far more common than I am. Not to insult you or anything, I don't want to do that, but...”

“You have insulted me.” Ivy grasps Dane's shoulder, pushes him to the edge of the bed where he trembles for a few seconds before toppling gracelessly to the floor in a jumble of twiggy limbs. He looks up at Ivy, shaking his head, his eyes gray-blue in the scant light and darkening like the first heavy cloud that announces a coming storm. “You knew how I've been used. I told you before. It isn't my fault you're unfit for tasks like that.”

“Unfit. How dare you call me unfit?” Dane bares his teeth and hisses, and Ivy advances on him with his palm raised but doesn't actually get a chance to slap him before he turns tail and darts out the door, and Ivy hears his bare footsteps smacking down the hall to his master's bedroom, and so be it. Ivy will content himself with Charlie's company tonight. Charlie somehow hasn't been awakened, is still lying sweetly on his side with his hands folded under his chin, snoring softly through pursed lips. After a while Ivy gets out of bed to shut the door to the hallway, and he sees the thin red strip of dawn on the far hills out the window, beyond the paddock and fence and woods belonging to his master. He needs to sleep, so he lies down again and gathers Charlie in his arms, and Charlie shifts slightly in his sleep but doesn't wake.

“I know I'm much plainer than he is.” Ivy says it softly, to himself, though it's nothing he needs to be told. He'll never be beautiful, but he's spent his life being useful instead. He sighs and nestles his head into the pillow beside Charlie's and soon he's asleep and dreaming of nothing at all.

The days continue to pass and to Ivy it seems as though Everett's forgotten his notion to have Charlie bred again. Charlie eats ravenously, puts on weight, is instructed by the women of Everett's household in the art of domestic servitude. He learns to wash linens and scrub pots and cook meals, and Ivy sees less and less of Charlie while he himself is left adrift without a purpose, without any useful tasks to perform. There's nothing to occupy his mind through the long dull days, nothing but reminiscences of his former life and thoughts of Charlie and their fond nightly reunions. Charlie comes to bed each night clean and naked, his skin flushed from scrubbing and scented with soap, and Ivy stirs from his nap and welcomes him into bed. In this regard, at least, Ivy is contented; not even in his days as a stud was his cock so well taken care of. Charlie grows bolder, makes use of tricks that Ivy suspects he's learned from Dane. Ivy comes inside him, night after night, but nothing changes. Everett must be giving him something to keep him from conceiving, and Ivy doesn't know if he's relieved or not.

Then one night Ivy wakes to find Charlie gone, and he doesn't know how long he's been asleep but the moon isn't yet high in the sky. He sits on the edge of the bed and waits, in case Charlie's just gone to the washroom, but the minutes crawl by and still he doesn't return. Eventually, disappointed, Ivy lies down again and goes to sleep, and the next morning Charlie's half of the bed is still cold and abandoned. So it remains the next night, and the next, and the one after that, and Dane doesn't visit him either and for the first time in a long time Ivy doesn't relish the freedom to stretch and sprawl as he wishes but instead wraps his arm around Charlie's pillow and buries his face in it for the faint soapy scent and pretends to himself that Charlie is still beside him.


	3. Chapter 3

He wakes late the next morning and hears strange noises in the hall outside his room, scufflings and muffled voices, and then someone knocks loudly, the sound ringing out brazen and clear like the tolling of a bell inside Ivy's head. That kind of knock demands to be answered, and he opens the door and finds his master standing there dressed in his fine meeting-day clothes with his hair and beard combed neatly and slicked with perfumed grease. He gestures to Ivy, holds out one hand, and Ivy grasps it, allows himself to be pulled forward, led down the hallway, and neither of them says a word until they reach the grand sitting room, which is really rather modest as these things go but well-supplied with intricately patterned imported rugs and velvet-cushioned chairs.

In the chairs are seated several men and women, all as finely dressed as Everett, all with a patient air of expectation. Ivy allows himself to be guided into their midst, allows Everett to show him off as if he were a prized breeding bull, to demonstrate all the attributes that make him an excellent stud.

“This here, look... have you ever seen one like this before?” Everett's handling Ivy's cock, gently, pushing back the small flap of skin that covers the head, flicking at it with his thumb in a way that makes Ivy's eye muscles twitch with pleasure. Then the corner of his mouth is going too, and he wishes he didn't have an audience for this because he must look very strange with the muscles in his face all flinching and flickering and he realizes his hand is white-knuckled gripping his own thigh and he doesn't know if everyone's looking at Everett's hand on his cock or his very obviously missing arm. All he knows is he wants Everett to keep touching him like that, rubbing the sensitive skin between his fingers, lightly squeezing Ivy's cock in his hand as he strokes it up and down. He snorts, grunts, warbles, makes all the least dignified noises he's capable of.

“You see how ready he is. Prepared, at a moment's notice, to climb atop the nearest willing female and mate.” This seems unfair, and Ivy would protest if he weren't experiencing such bliss. There are women among the seated audience, but their gaze on his body is no different than the men's, and they're all looking at him like he's a racehorse or a prize rooster, something that has no will of its own and no choice but to blindly follow its master's direction.

“Is there a mare to go with him?”

“A lovely one. Not the most beautiful, but a darling plucky little thing.”

Charlie, of course, Ivy can smell him, can scent his arousal almost as if he really were a breeding bull or a stallion, and there's Charlie being shooed towards him by Everett and he's naked and skinny but no worse for wear, and there's a heavy leather collar around his neck and a length of rope fastened around his ribcage above and below his tits, forcing them together like an especially confining garment but leaving them bared to the gaze of the audience. Everett slaps him fondly on the rump and Charlie quivers and starts and stumbles against Ivy and Ivy catches him, pulls Charlie to his side and wraps his arm around his waist.

“A fine pair,” Everett pronounces, to the murmured agreement of most of the seated observers. “They'll make the most splendid foals, won't they? Tall and strong like their father, sweet and docile like their mother. Exemplary slaves, I'm sure.”

“Charlie...” Ivy doesn't know why he's spoken, doesn't know what he wants to say. There's nothing to be done for it now. He can only hope that this ritual satisfies Everett, that it doesn't hurt Charlie, that he'll be able to carry the foal once Ivy starts it growing inside him. He thinks again of the round belly Charlie had when they first met, the paradoxical swelling of his womb while the rest of him withered and shrank to the bone. He's a great deal more vigorous now, it's true, even if he's still quite scrawny for a broodmare.

“Down on all fours, Charlie, there's a dear.” Everett again, commanding good-naturedly from his comfortable seat, velvet cushions underneath him, his elbow propped on the padded arm of his chair as he continues to stroke Ivy's prick. Then he releases it and swats Ivy on the rear, which honestly is something Ivy doesn't enjoy at all, and he allows himself a small grunt of dissatisfaction as he positions himself behind Charlie, who's spreading his legs and offering himself to be bred, thrusting his cunt in the air for all he's worth. It's now that Ivy notices that Charlie's pubic mound has been waxed and scraped, rendered entirely hairless. There are murmurs of admiration from the crowd; Charlie's cunt is so pretty, so well-formed, so pink and tight and smooth.

Ivy enters it, as he's done hundreds of times, and it almost seems as though he can forget that they're being watched. All the free men and women seated in a circle around them are silent, as if witnessing some holy rite, their faces rapt, their eyes fixed on the place where Ivy's body is joined to Charlie's. The point of connection is well-lubricated, as usual, and Ivy thrusts gently into Charlie's warmth, and as he does so he's also looking at his shining cock sliding in and out, parting the lips of Charlie's cunt over and over again.

He comes without fanfare, withdraws carefully, and the audience murmurs their disappointment; most career studs are more accustomed to putting on a show, to yowling out their pleasure, screaming and swearing and bucking as they finish in their broodmares' cunts, but Ivy has always found such theatrics to be quite beyond him and anyway, he's got the job done well enough. At Everett's urging, Charlie turns slowly in place, spreading himself open with both hands and displaying the not-insignificant amount of fluid Ivy's deposited inside him. Then he stands still in the middle of the room and the guests file up to squeeze his tits and ass and belly, to prod and pinch and fondle and feel, in short to do everything to him except what Ivy's just done, and of course, Ivy thinks, it's foolish for a broodmare to be treated this way. Charlie shouldn't be overstimulated, should be allowed to rest with Ivy's seed inside him, to give it a fair chance to fertilize and implant. He glances at Ivy over the shoulders of his admirers, seems to need to keep an eye on him, and Ivy stands helplessly, his arm at his side. If he were a career stud, and Charlie a proper broodmare, they'd have no more to do with each other until after the foal was born, if Ivy were chosen to breed him again. At least here they'll be together, sharing the same small bed, he'll be able to reach for Charlie in the night, to nestle cozily with him, comfort him, ease the pains of foal-carrying as best he can.

“It's all right,” Ivy tells him, that night in bed. “If you don't catch this time, I'll just breed you again. You're not going to get thrown out.”

“What if I am?” Charlie's voice is strange, soft and even but with a hard and almost hysterical edge, as if he's holding back tears. “You're the one he wants. The master. He doesn't care for me or Dane. We're disposable.”

“That's enough.” Ivy's started thinking, which he doesn't like to do after he's lowered his head to the pillow. “Why do you say that? What do you mean, I'm the one he wants? He likes you and Dane well enough.”

“That's why he acquired us, isn't it? Because of you. Because he wanted you to be happy, to have friends.”

“You aren't my friends.” Charlie only harrumphs in reply, but finally turns his back to Ivy and settles down, and Ivy leans into him, presses his cock against Charlie's warm rump and nestles his head against Charlie's shoulder and waits for him to fall asleep, wondering if it's true what he's said, if Everett only acquired Charlie and Dane to please him. If that was his aim, there are a great many other things he could have done instead. Ivy is the one who should be concerned with pleasing his master, not the other way around.

The next day is no different from any number of others, and the next is much the same, and the next, and it isn't until a few weeks have passed that Charlie begins to show signs that he's in foal. He wakes in the early morning, and Ivy can hear him vomiting in the washroom across the hall. Sometimes he doesn't make it that far, and Ivy wakes to find him crouching on the floor with a rag and a basin of soapy water and a guilty expression. Now, in these early stages of pregnancy, Charlie doesn't want Ivy to touch him, and Ivy allows him the space he needs, frolics with Dane in his hayloft instead.

It's pleasant enough up there, warm and dusty and full of the mellow smells of hay and manure, years and years of it drying in the sun, and the old warped planks and crooked beams are furred with dust and festooned with cobwebs, and Dane's made a little home for himself in the farthest corner under the eaves. Here he's gathered together blankets and furs and bits of furniture scavenged from the main house, too shabby to be seen by polite company but good enough for his purposes. He has an old feather-stuffed bolster that leaks at the seams, and a tin bucket to wash in, and several moth-eaten horse skins that he piles over himself when the nights are cold. Of course he's surrounded by bales of hay as well, and he's constructed from them a kind of bower, a cave with a rudimentary corbelled ceiling, and Ivy enjoys bedding down with him there, feeling safe and secure and hidden from the world.

“How's the little missus?” Dane asks him one night, when they're lying together listening to the crickets and the pleasantly distant sounds of music from the master's house. “Still too skinny, I hear.”

“He'll be all right.” Ivy doesn't know if that's true, but he doesn't want to admit it to Dane. Somehow, admitting how much he worries for Charlie would be a spectacular show of weakness. Quite beneath him, and he's been so successful recently at retaining his dignity.

“You really care for him, don't you?” Dane stretches like a cat, his slender white body bare on top of his pile of skins, and Ivy studies him. In spite of his very obvious flaw, he really is a beauty. It's a shame he could never be a top-tier pleasure slave, that his time in prison has made him unfit to serve as a courtesan or consort; Ivy could see him on the arm of a government official, or lying on a silken carpet at the feet of an emperor. Instead he's flogged around by Everett, hauling hay and sinking fence posts and sucking the old man's cock every night before he retires; not a bad life, certainly, a slave of his caliber could do worse, but still Ivy can't help but think of what might have been. He shrugs his shoulders and turns away, doesn't answer Dane's question.

“Ivy.”

“What?”

“It's your mother, isn't it? You loved her, and she was a broodmare. You're softhearted for broodmares, aren't you? You see your mother in Charlie, and that's why you don't want him to suffer.”

“Why should he suffer? He's so young. And so harmless.”

“You remember her name well enough, don't you. Cinnamon, the woman who gave birth to you. What I wonder is, what kind of magnificent stud could have sired a creature like you.”

“I don't know his name. He belonged to an old friend of my mistress. My mother said that it was the best thing that could have happened to her, being bred to him.”

“Of course.” Dane sighs, turns over onto his back, runs a hand idly down his chest and stomach and twists his fingers in the pale golden-orange curls of his pubic hair. “That's how the best slaves are made. When the stud and the mare are truly fond of each other, like you and Charlie.”

“She didn't care for him. He was only a stud. She didn't even know his name.”

“Shh.” Dane's quiet for a while, still touching himself, wrapping his fingers around his cock and stroking idly, a slight motion that never fails to draw Ivy's eye. The boy looks good like that, his cock hard and flushed with blood, firm pinkish flesh in his white hand as he strokes, the damp head brushing his belly, beads of moisture on his skin. Ivy gets the feeling that Dane could be happy with no touch but his own for the rest of his life, that he could satisfy himself endlessly just like this, be mindless and pleased with his eyes shut tight and his hand wrapped around his cock. 

“It wasn't for love of him that she made you.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dane at this point has lost interest in the conversation and begun jerking himself off in earnest, and Ivy rolls over and closes his eyes, and the air in their little hideout is warm and sweet with hay and he drifts off to sleep listening to Dane's small yelps of satisfaction. He dreams of his mother, Cinnamon, his lady mistress' favorite broodmare. A stunningly pretty girl, everyone said so, black-haired and green-eyed and freckled, with the loveliest smile, all her teeth still whole and white. Her hands were soft, her voice low and sweet, and Ivy remembers her laugh. He dreams he's lying next to her in the bed they shared when he was a small boy; he dreams he's a child again, a foal snuggled warm and close against his mother's side.

When Ivy wakes early the next morning, it's because someone's attempting to haul themselves up the ladder into the hayloft and making a great deal of noise about it. He opens one eye, then, slowly, the other one, and as he lies there watching, Charlie heaves himself forward, grasps and scrabbles at the floor, crawls toward Dane's bed on his hands and knees. He's wearing nothing but one of the master's cast-off undershirts, a bunch of thin billowy fabric falling around him, translucent over his tits which are already growing heavy, his dark nipples clearly visible through the shirt.

“Charlie.” Charlie starts guiltily, appears to notice Ivy for the first time. “What's wrong? What are you doing?”

“I was lonely.”

“You can't come up here. You're in foal, you'll hurt yourself.”

“I'm all right.” He strips the shirt off over his head and there's his body displayed in the early morning light, his gleaming ribs and his soft white breasts, his growing belly taut and bluish with veins, his thighs and ass still fleshless. He clearly hasn't put on enough weight, but his eyes are clear and his hands don't shake and he seems altogether less pitiable than he has in a long time. He lies down naked next to Dane, and Ivy waits, and watches the two of them, and considers slipping quietly out of the hayloft and back to his own bed, back into his dreams of childhood and the house of his first mistress where he was warm and safe and loved.

Then Dane sits up and stretches and pulls Charlie into his arms and exclaims over the size of his tits, curving his hands around them, containing that abundance of flesh as best he can.

“I have an idea,” he says. “Come here and lie on your back.” Charlie does as he says, lies on his back with his arms flung over his head and his chest heaving and his tits even softer-looking in repose, and Dane grabs them in both hands again. He pushes them together, lets them slump apart, pulls at the nipples and rubs at them with his thumbs. Charlie moans softly, and Ivy can't tell if he's enjoying it or not.

“They've grown so much,” Dane marvels. “They're big enough now, aren't they?” Very slowly and deliberately, he lifts one knee and straddles Charlie's chest, and his hard prick rests between the two soft tits that he mounds together with his hands. Ivy watches, of course, he can't look away until Dane comes, and the look on Charlie's face once his neck and collarbones are spattered and sticky with Dane's come is one he's seen before, that look of sheepish satisfaction, shamed but utterly thrilled at the same time. Dane cleans up his mess without complaint or hesitation, and it's not unpleasant to watch him lick and suck his own issue from Charlie's skin. In any case, they're a pretty pair, and Ivy doesn't dislike seeing them together. As he's said before, Charlie's not his wife. They have no claim on each other, no questions of loyalty. Charlie is only someone with whom Ivy enjoys passing time, and Dane is more or less the same. Still, though, with Charlie's tits and belly visibly swelled from his willing contributions, Ivy can't help but feel a bit of the old possessiveness. Dane can play around as he wishes, but Ivy will see to it that no other stud breeds his mare.

Charlie softens, grows more languid, puts on weight in his thighs and rump as well as his belly, and he allows Ivy free rein with his body, lets him meticulously note and catalogue every change. His nipples grow much darker, his face flushes red, a dark line appears running straight down from his navel. Still Ivy hardly ever sees him eat, but at least he no longer spends his mornings bent over the commode. Charlie's hair seems to grow darker and glossier and softer to the touch, even his pubic hair seems less wiry, and a glow seems to emanate from his skin, which has become uncommonly smooth and poreless.

“I was never like this before,” he explains one night in bed, after they've rutted lazily and rolled back to their separate sides to sweat and breathe heavily. It's summer now, and the nights are warm. “It never felt good to be in foal, but it does now.”

“It couldn't be any different. It ought to be the same as before.”

“It's because of you, Ivy. Because I'm fond of you. I want to be in foal to you, carry that small part of you inside my body. I've never wanted it before.”

“Go to sleep. You must be tired.”

“Ivy...”

“Hush.” Ivy would never say it out loud, but he too feels as if this foal is different. Perhaps the master won't sell this one, perhaps they can keep her here and feed her and care for her and watch her grow, and Ivy feels an unaccustomed glow of pride as he imagines Charlie with their child at his breast, looking down at her fondly as she nurses, stroking her wispy hair. For some reason he feels as though this foal will be a female; she ought to be beautiful, then, maybe even as beautiful as Cinnamon was.

Everett sends for the doctor one day in early autumn, when the leaves of the swamp maple trees in the hollow are tipped with flame and the milkweed plants in the paddock have begun to burst their pods and fling their seeds skyward. The doctor examines Charlie thoroughly, pulling his lips back to peer at his teeth and gums, shining a penlight down his throat and into his ears and his eyes, moving both hands gently and lingeringly over his tits and belly, feeling their swollen ripeness. Charlie is an exemplary broodmare at last, a perfect symbol of servitude and fecundity, full and docile and heavy and utterly without any will of his own. Ivy has seen this before, seen even the cleverest of females lapse into brainlessness once they've been bred; it's a method of controlling them, he knows. Rebellious slaves are often bred to wear down their resistance, though he's sure Charlie was never like that. A sweet creature like him, Ivy's certain, has a natural inclination to please, an instinctive need for praise and approval.

“Aren't you a good lad,” the doctor tells him, stroking his hair as he lies at his ease in the master's bed. Everett's bed, again, and it occurs to Ivy to wonder how many foals have been born there. Charlie isn't tied to the bedposts this time, and he's naked, lying on his side, his great belly rising and falling with gentle breaths. This will be a good birth, an easy birth. This foal wants to be brought into the world, and Ivy feels that strange tenderness again, thinking of holding it, cradling the tiny brand-new thing against his chest: a child born of his and Charlie's fondness for each other. That's how the best slaves are made, Dane had said, and Ivy can't help but agree.

“He's in fine form,” the doctor assures Everett. “There should be no difficulty with this one. You've prepared him well.”

“You see the company he's been keeping. He's been very well tended to these past months. No broodmare was ever so lucky.”

“You've done him a great service.” The doctor grasps Ivy's hand, and Ivy is a little taken aback but tries as usual not to show it. “He's a lucky boy indeed, to have such a fine upstanding slave to look after him.”

“He's the stud as well. The foal is his, and all the more fortunate for it.”

“It will be sure to flourish, then.” The doctor steps back, removes his glasses, closes his medical bag. “Look after your mare, my boy. The foal will come this afternoon at the latest, and we must all be ready.” Ivy nods; he knows what he has to do. He stays at Charlie's side, and Everett and the doctor and the other slaves hover and gawk and wander in and out. He wets Charlie's forehead with a cloth dipped in a basin of water and speaks softly to him and pets him and soothes him and circles the room more than once making sure every knot is undone and every bottle unstoppered.

Charlie dozes off, still lying there on his side with his arms wrapped around his great belly, and Ivy pulls the sheets and blankets up to cover him decently and continues to wait. Nothing changes, and the doctor returns and takes Charlie's pulse and mutters to himself and behaves as though Ivy isn't there, still anxious, still waiting. Then Everett's standing at the foot of the bed, looking concerned, and the female slave who wet-nursed Charlie's last foal is with him. She's a small freckled creature with dark hair and barely any tits, but Ivy finds her pleasant to look at. He'd mount her, given the chance, but she's not a broodmare and she's hardly so much as glanced in his direction in all the time they've lived under the same roof.

“Something's not right,” the doctor says. “He's gone comatose. I'm going to have to induce labor.” Ivy hears nothing after that but the panicked thumping of his heart in his ears, and his first thought is of Dane, laboring in the fields. He pushes past Everett and the doctor and flings open the door, then he's down the hall and there's the heavy front door and the steps and the stone path, and Dane is in the herb garden pulling weeds and he doesn't see Ivy running towards him but then he sits up on his haunches, caked with sweat and dust, and turns and opens his mouth as if to ask a question but Ivy speaks before he can.

“Something's wrong with Charlie,” he says. “He's fallen asleep.”

“Asleep?”

“Not an ordinary sleep.” Comatose; Ivy's heard the word before. An old slave of his former mistress had fallen into a coma after suffering a head injury. He doesn't understand how this could be happening to Charlie, but he knows that he ought not to panic, that he and Dane should be there now to render whatever service they can. In Everett's bedroom the doctor is crouched between Charlie's spread legs and trying to widen the opening of his cunt with gloved hands, and the protruding head of the foal can be seen there, distorted and bloodied. Charlie is deadly still and white as paper and Ivy can't tell if he's still breathing.

“Is he going to die?” Dane says, and Ivy kneels by the bed, touches Charlie's face, finds his skin still warm and damp. His breath is a weak flutter against Ivy's palm, but it's more than nothing, and he mutters in his strange sleep as the doctor's hands pull him wider and wider, ripping his cunt along the lines of the old wounds, where his flesh tore the last time he gave birth. He whimpers like an animal, and Ivy doesn't hear Charlie in these sounds anymore, doesn't hear anything but a panicked creature clinging to what breath it has left, the life in its body about to flicker out like a guttering flame, and Ivy has to do something but he doesn't know what.

“Cut him,” Ivy hears himself say. “Open his belly. Otherwise you'll never get it out.”

“Your mare is going to die if the foal doesn't come out,” the doctor says, and he has his instruments laid out on the table beside the bed, all those shining steel blades polished and sharpened and ready to carve into living flesh, and Ivy can't watch but neither can he look away and the doctor makes a long incision starting just between and beneath Charlie's breasts and running down the entire length of his abdomen. Ivy had known there would be blood, but he wasn't expecting this much. The master's sheets and blankets are soaked, and Dane's bent over in the corner throwing up, and the smell of the room is like a battlefield. Charlie still doesn't open his eyes, is still breathing so slowly that Ivy can hardly see his chest rise and fall.

At some point Everett had left the room without anyone noticing, and Dane quietly slips out as well, leaving Ivy alone with Charlie and the doctor and the squalling foal that he's pulled out of the deep incision in Charlie's stomach. There are piles of misarranged flesh everywhere; Charlie's uterus is no longer inside his body, but held between the doctor's gloved hands. It's a strange-looking thing, pink and flimsy and dripping, and Ivy can see from the way it's been cut into that Charlie will never carry another foal in it. He's no longer any use as a broodmare, which means he's worthless, which means that Everett will likely sell him to the scrap yard and Ivy will never see him again.

Ivy isn't permitted to stay with Charlie that night, but sent to his own bed, and after a while Dane joins him there. He doesn't say anything, but wraps his arms around Ivy's neck and nestles his face into Ivy's shoulder and his slow breathing as he falls asleep is gentle and comforting but Ivy can't stop thinking about Charlie. He's been ruined after all, salvaged from the discard pile only to be destroyed, and by Ivy's own foal, his offspring growing too large and unwieldy inside Charlie's body. There's nothing to be done now but wait for Everett's verdict, to witness him casting Charlie out or selling him to a scrap yard or a brothel or any number of other unsavory things, and the foal; Ivy's sure the new foal will be sold as well, that soon there won't be anything left here that belonged to Charlie.

Ivy wakes the next morning because Dane's shaking his shoulder, and he blinks and groans and leans out of bed and stumbles blearily down the hall to the master's bedroom, where Charlie is still asleep in Everett's bed. He looks better than he did yesterday: his skin isn't quite so pale, and he appears to be muttering in his sleep, snorting and mumbling and twitching, turning this way and that as he dreams. He's alive, after all, and there's hope for recovery, but there's his uterus in a glass jar on the table. Discarded, ruined, useless, in tatters.

Dane perches on the bed beside him, and Ivy joins him there, and for a while they sit like that, solemn, not speaking, not looking at each other; for the most part Ivy's gaze is drawn by the pulped horror in the glass jar, the pile of shredded meat that's all that remains of Charlie's womb.

“Charlie.” Dane speaks his name softly, reaches out to touch his bare shoulder, his slim gentle hand with its soft fingers, and Ivy thinks of how he really does admire the boy after all; how Dane, despite his youth and inexperience, has been a good companion to him these past months. He's sharp and quick-witted, remains eager to learn as well as to impart knowledge of his own. With Charlie, he's never impatient, always gentle and solicitous and sweet, and Ivy finds he enjoys watching them together.

“Ivy?” Charlie blinks, throws one hand across his eyes to shield them, though the curtains are drawn and there's little light in the room. “Dane and Ivy, I hear you...”

“We're here.” Very carefully, Ivy strokes Charlie's hair away from his face, feels the slight stickiness of drying tears on his cheeks. Dane's lifting Charlie's head, easing it into his lap, and with their two bodies they form a kind of fortification around him, Ivy lying on his side, and Charlie sighs and leans back into him and his body is naked and burning hot under the sheets wrapped around it and the whole room smells sweet and heavy with his sweat.

“Do you know what happened?” he says, hoarsely, stumblingly, as if he's still dreaming. He doesn't move, lies still and heavy and hot, sunk into the master's feather mattress like a stone. 

“This was inside you. It was the pouch where you carried your foals.” Charlie nods; he seems to understand.

“I'm sorry.” Ivy doesn't know why he's apologizing; it was his master's urging, after all, that's brought them to this, the master's insistence on breeding Charlie when he had barely recovered from his last birth. Masters can make foolish decisions sometimes, use good slaves without due consideration for their flesh, and Ivy doesn't like it but he knows there's nothing he can do.


	4. Chapter 4

“I won't carry again. I can't be a broodmare anymore.” Charlie's crying now, softly, sniffling and wiping his nose on Dane's trouser leg, his shoulders rising and falling with slow sobs. “Our master will throw me out now. Bury me in the trash heap.”

“Not quite.” Everett has entered the room, is standing at the foot of the bed watching the three of them with something like paternal pride. “Poor little Charlie. And you boys, how good of you to look after your mare like this.”

“Where's the foal?”

“Being assessed for immediate sale. She'll make a fine lady's maid one day.”

“You've sold her?”

“There were a great many interested buyers at your coupling. Trouble is, there will never be another foal quite like this one.” Everett shakes his head, looking sorrowful. “I had hoped to produce many more from the two of you. Perhaps even establish a new breed.”

“You don't know yet if she's any good,” Dane points out, and Ivy cringes inwardly but can do little more than glare at him in the company of their master. Everett, however, seems to be in a very indulgent mood. He tilts his head to one side and taps his chin as if giving this thought due consideration.

“It's true,” he says, “I have studied the science of genetics, made it into a bit of a hobby, but still... one can't know, for certain, whether the qualities of a slave will breed true. Suppose the little one grows up to favor neither of her parents, suppose instead she takes after... well, Charlie, your parentage is entirely unknown, isn't it? What if your line isn't very good after all, what if you're the only one that's worth anything?”

“You didn't know his parents either.” This time, Ivy pretends to stretch and raps Dane on the back of the head with his fist, but Dane still doesn't look nearly as abashed as he should. Ivy doesn't really have the authority to rebuke him properly for speaking out of turn; but as before, Everett appears not to mind.

“His mother I knew. I met her on many occasions. A lovely girl, gentle and obedient, yes, demure as anything-- I never once saw her mistress need to correct her- but there was a great deal more to her than that. One doesn't expect a slave, especially a broodmare, to be quite so well-spoken or quick-witted. She was delightful to converse with, as I recall. This one must have inherited his taciturn nature from his father.” Here he pats Ivy's shoulder fondly, and Ivy thinks of his mother, tries to conjure up her face and voice again, tries to remember an occasion when Everett visited his mistress; when they were all four of them in the same room. He remembers Cinnamon, bare-breasted and kneeling in her long skirt, leaning in close to whisper in Everett's ear, and he remembers the mistress laughing and emptying glass after glass of wine, and he remembers Everett speaking of him admiringly; that son of yours, Cinnamon, your pretty little firstborn child, what a dainty creature he is. How striking, with his pale skin and dark eyes. How handsome, certainly. What a man he'll be, when he's grown.

“Come now, Ivy. It's late, isn't it? Let's go to bed.”

“This is your bed. Begging your pardon, master.”

“Yours, then. We'll leave these two as they are. Come, now.” And Ivy follows at Everett's heels like he's always done, and lies down beside him in the bed he's become accustomed to sharing with Charlie, and he knows he shouldn't be thinking of one man while he's servicing another but his thoughts are all of Charlie as he lowers his head, as he rests his cheek on Everett's thigh and mouths disinterestedly at the old man's cock.

“I haven't fucked you yet,” Everett says. “I've been wondering what it would be like. How pleasant it would be to claim your arse.”

“My master, please, if it's not-- if it isn't too improper to ask...” Ivy notices Everett looking askance at him and realizes he's been gritting his teeth; he clears his throat and tries to relax his jaw muscles, and starts again.

“Begging your pardon, of course, but why--”

“Oh, Ivy. Darling Ivy.” Everett laughs, and reaches out with one hand to stroke Ivy's cheek, a gesture of unaccustomed tenderness. “You know, we've been a long time reaching the stage of our acquaintanceship where such things would be proper, and that's all as it should be. You don't need to be so nervous. You're a good slave, and you've already done so much to please me.”

“Sir.” Ivy only nods, pretends to agree with his master as is expected of him. He wouldn't say he's afraid of the man, not exactly, but Everett's shown himself to be unpredictable, and Charlie's fate has still to be decided. Everett can discard him, or scrap him for parts, or sell him on, and in his condition no reputable buyer would want him.

“You know, Ivy, sometimes, in certain lights, I really believe you're almost pretty.” Everett still has a hand on Ivy's face, the fingers spread almost delicately, as if he were a blind man feeling for some impression of what he's never seen before. “You have your mother's eyes, after all. And her lips, and her charming smile. This, though...” He touches Ivy's nose, prods at the sensitive spot where bone gives way to cartilage. “This nose of yours you must have inherited from your father. I'll always wonder what he looked like, the stud who sired you.”

“We never met.”

“Of course not. No, you wouldn't have.” Everett's touching Ivy's lips now, stroking them with the pad of his thumb, and Ivy can't help but think about how much more enjoyable it would be if Dane or Charlie were the one petting and complimenting him. He's come to take pleasure in their company, to look forward to their days and nights together, to be lonesome for them when they can't be with him; it's an odd feeling, but he doesn't altogether dislike it.

“You don't like it.” Everett withdraws his hand suddenly, and Ivy recoils from him, startled and guilty. He's been disloyal, allowed his indifference to show; not only indifference, no, worse than that, he's shown Everett his traitorous disgust, has allowed himself to feel actual disdain for his master's touch. He's no proper slave; he's the one who deserves to be discarded, not Charlie.

“Sir?” Ivy feigns ignorance, but it's too late. Everett's standing up, straightening his shirt, buttoning himself back into his trousers. Ivy sits on the edge of the bed, painfully upright and rigid, waiting for a blow to descend, but it never comes. Instead Everett leaves without another word, but Ivy knows a great punishment must be forthcoming. He's scorned his master, dishonored himself, dishonored his mother; the woman who gave him life, who loved him and raised him to be everything a slave should be: patient, obedient, acquiescent, enduring and above all discreet. A slave must bear everything with grace, accept his master's attentions gratefully; Ivy has always known this, but now he's failed. Perhaps he's been allowed too much freedom. Everett, after all, has gone so long without fucking him that Ivy had begun to assume he was no longer interested, having no shortage of younger and prettier slaves to cater to his appetites.

Ivy sleeps restlessly that night, and his dreams are all of Charlie. Charlie lying unmoving in Everett's bed as centuries pass, as dust and cobwebs gather and settle on him and eventually hide his inert body from view. Charlie buried under a cairn of rocks that Ivy has to shift, painstakingly, one by one, sweating and groaning and about to break in two under their great weight, each heavier and more sharp-cornered and unwieldy than the last. Charlie walking naked through the snowy streets, hunched and harried with his arms crossed over his chest, his shoeless feet leaving odd hoofed prints.

He wakes to discover Dane beside him, both arms around him, his head on Ivy's chest and his warm breath on Ivy's bare skin as he snores. Ivy is wearier than he's ever been in his life, wonders how much longer he can bear up under this great burden of uncertainty. Being scorned by his master the night before- without being punished, no less-- had unsettled him, and he's unused to sleeping so poorly. He rolls onto his side and gently deposits the still-unconscious Dane onto the mattress; Dane stops snoring but doesn't wake, and in the sudden silence Ivy hears footsteps. Light, hesitant, moving towards him, and they stop at his bedroom door, retreat a short distance before approaching again. There's a barely audible knock on the door, which Ivy doesn't answer, and after awhile another. Then nothing, and nothing, and when he's just about to roll over and go back to sleep, the door creaks open and someone steps into the room.

There's enough light for Ivy to recognize his visitor as one of Everett's female slaves, the slender one with the dark hair and dainty little tits; though why she'd have any reason to call on him, he can't begin to guess. She moves swiftly and silently to his bedside, decisive now, intent upon her errand, whatever it is. She lays a hand on his arm, grasps and shakes, and he shifts Dane aside and sits up on the edge of the bed.

“What is it?” Ivy yawns, and Dane stirs beside him, and the woman beckons, motions for him to stand and follow her. Up a narrow flight of stairs at the rear of the house, into a little loftlike room under the eaves furnished only with a pair of narrow cots, and on one of them, a baby wrapped in a blanket. A tiny thing, pink and brand-new and fast asleep, her head crowned with a tuft of wispy black hair. Ivy recognizes her, though of course she's much cleaner now.

“Charlie's foal.”

“And yours.” The woman picks up the sleeping infant and offers her to Ivy, and Ivy curves his arm around her small body and holds her against his chest. Such a lovely thing, warm and small and alive and breathing softly, and to think that he and Charlie had made her, that she was born of their fondness for each other...

“She should know her father, at least a little.”

“I only sired her.”

“I know.” The woman sits down on the cot by the window, pulls down the neck of her loose cotton shirt to expose her breast, which is visibly swollen and etched with heavy veins. She takes the foal from Ivy again, and the little creature reaches for the breast, latches on eagerly, begins to drink. Ivy watches, and strokes her hair, and for a while he doesn't think at all, doesn't worry for Charlie's life or his own, only watches the slave girl feeding the foal that he sired and half-remembers his own mother's embrace.

Several times in the early hours of the morning this happens again, Ivy is invited to the small upstairs room and handed the growing child, who seems to be thriving in the care of Everett's female slaves. She drinks cow's milk from a bottle when her wet nurse's breasts dry up, and Ivy holds her and feeds her, propping her head up with the stump of his missing arm.

Charlie returns to Ivy's bed, slower and more sorrowful than ever, and for a long time he just lies there and refuses to move or talk or eat, and Ivy spends the long days sitting at his side like a dog. Everett doesn't come to him again, and Ivy grows more and more apprehensive, fears for their future as he never has before. Perhaps Everett has come to realize how useless he and Charlie really are, how used up and ruined they were in their former lives. Remaining idle for so long is a torment to Ivy, and that's why he's overjoyed when, one day at the end of summer, Everett gives him a fine new suit of clothes to put on and tells him they're going to the great market in the mountain town far to the north.

Ivy puts on the good sturdy canvas trousers, the new white cotton shirt, the wool socks, the soft and lustrous old leather shoes that must have belonged first to someone else but fit his feet as if they were made for him. He bathes and shaves in warm water and for the first time in a long time he seeks out his reflection in the tall mirror in the master's bedroom and studies himself, finds a slightly diminished version of the man he was in his prime; his eyes seem more sunken, his bones more prominent, he's lost flesh here and there but he'd dare to say he cuts a fine figure for a slave of his age.

Everett has one more gift for him before they begin their journey: a collar, thick and broad and made of well-aged leather, with a heavy shiny brass buckle that rests at Ivy's throat. This pleases him; he hasn't been considered worthy of collaring since before the accident that took his arm. Everett looks him up and down approvingly, and leads him out to the stable yard where Dane stands holding the reins of Everett's team of draft horses. He's groomed them himself, and harnessed them to the wagon, and Everett takes the reins and dismisses him and soon he and Ivy are perched side by side on the buckboard and headed down the hill into town.

Ivy is quite happy for now to sit in the sun as the wagon jolts and bounces down the road, thinking of what seems to him to be a stroke of good luck; if Everett were going to get rid of Charlie, he'd take him to the great market and sell him to a slush dealer or a butcher or dump him off with some disreputable brothel owner or any number of other things, but Charlie's been left at home with Dane and the girls and instructions to launder all the drapes and household linens.

That evening, having stopped only once or twice to piss behind a tree at the roadside (and to afford Ivy the opportunity to do likewise) Everett reins the horses to a halt at the foot of a broad granite stairway that switchbacks up a steep hill to the front door of a house which at least from this distance seems far less grand than such an entrance would suggest. There's an iron-caged gas lamp atop a high post, and under it stands a boy about Dane's age who must be a slave awaiting Everett's arrival.

“The master's expecting you,” he says when Everett hands him the reins, and his voice like his face is blank and pleasant and unremarkable.

“Thank you, Merle.” Everett nods, and offers Ivy his arm even though Ivy is perfectly capable of climbing down from the buckboard himself. Merle, he notices, steals a hasty glance at the empty sleeve of his jacket before he clucks to the horses and urges them on down the long curving driveway. The wagon swiftly rattles around the bend and out of sight, and Ivy begins the ascent of the great sweep of stairs, following at a prudent distance behind his master.

A female slave, bare-chested despite the evening chill, answers the door and ushers them into the inner sanctum, where another shirtless female is pouring tea for a man who must be their master. Both girls are cast in the same mold, willowy and small-breasted with long dark hair, and neither of them speak or raise their eyes from the floor as Everett sits down in a claw-footed armchair opposite the master's couch and gestures for Ivy to kneel beside him.

“Your new acquisitions are charming,” Everett says, accepting his own cup of tea from the slave girl. “I'm sorry it's taken me so long to come admire them.”

“Oh, yeah, they'll do. They're all right. They're young.” The man of the house- quite young himself, Ivy notes, but distinguished-looking, with rather sleek and neatly tended facial hair-- speaks dismissively of his playthings, sounds as if he couldn't possibly be more bored by this topic of conversation. Ivy isn't particularly interested in it either, and he allows his mind to wander while his posture remains irreproachably straight at his master's side, his eyes cast down in the proper resting position. At length he's called back to attention by Everett's hand on his shoulder, and he looks to his master for instruction.

“Come here, Ivy. I'd like you here, just in front of me, with your mouth open...” Everett unfastens his pants and removes his cock, and Ivy kneels obediently between his legs and takes the flaccid length into his throat, but when he begins to work at it with his lips and tongue Everett clucks reprovingly and raps him on the head.

“Keep still,” he says, and returns to his conversation. Ivy kneels like that for what seems like a very long time, and Everett's cock grows slightly harder in his mouth and occasionally Everett's hand comes down and ruffles his hair or strokes his cheek, but other than that nothing changes until, without warning, a hot stream of liquid comes spurting out of Everett's cock; it's piss, of course, and there's no place for it to go but directly down Ivy's throat. This is more than he's prepared to stand, and without thinking he backs off the cock in his mouth as quickly as he can and retches up a vile stew of piss and saliva and stomach acid onto the spotless carpet.

Ivy's blood runs cold and everyone in the room is staring at him, even the slaves, and he holds a hand to his mouth trying to stem the tide of vomit but he can't hold it in and his stomach heaves again and he stares at the slimy puddle on the rug, wishing helplessly that none of this had happened, that he could take it all back and keep it down. His vision goes white at the edges and he realizes distantly that he's panicking, he's begun to breathe too rapidly and the sour taste in his mouth is still making him gag as Everett seizes him by the arm and drags him from the room, and he addresses some remark to the man of the house as he leaves but Ivy can't hear anything over the blood pounding in his ears.

Then Ivy loses consciousness, or anyway there's a gap in his memory where he stopped seeing or hearing anything at all and the next thing he knows he's in a dank basement room where there's a washtub and a wringer and heaps of soiled bedding. No windows, a single locked door, and he's still wearing all his clothes but now his mouth tastes like the bitter salt of Everett's come. He raises his hand to his mouth and wipes away the sticky residue, and after that there's nothing to do but huddle in the corner with his back against the damp stone wall waiting for someone to come and pronounce sentence on him. What he did was unworthy of even the greenest brothel slave, even the youngest and most inexperienced of half-dollar whores would have known better than to actually vomit while being used by his master, and now Ivy has revealed his true unworthiness and he's going to be disposed of the way he should have been all those years ago when his arm was taken off.

What he regrets most, oddly enough, is that he'll never see Charlie again, that Charlie will remain at Everett's mercy without Ivy to protect him, to provide what comfort and shelter he can. Ivy closes his eyes, thinks of resting his head on Charlie's soft chest, listening to his heartbeat and the low whisper of his breath as he falls asleep, his snores and small sighs, all the peaceful settling sounds of his body as they lay together in the bed they shared, really those were the best nights of Ivy's life when he could fall asleep with Charlie beside him, when everything was sweet and silent and warm in the gentle darkness.

Ivy bolts awake to the sound of someone rattling a key in the door lock, and he sits up hastily, remembering with chagrin where he is and why he was thrown down here. He kneels, his head inclined, awaiting punishment, not daring to look up at whoever's entered the room. He hears a man's voice speak his name, softly, cajolingly, as if he's calling a beloved pet.

“Good lad, Ivy. It's all right. Look at me.”

Ivy looks up, and the master of the house is standing there. He's carrying a tray, which he places on the floor, and then he extends one hand as if inviting Ivy to grasp it.

“Don't be afraid. I'm not going to punish you.”

“Sir.” Ivy hesitates, then takes the master's offered hand in his. It's bony and callused and warm, and he's wondering how soon it would be proper to let go when the man's other hand alights on his shoulder, then moves in to stroke his cheek. Ivy turns into the gentle touch, automatically seeking approval and affection, and the man murmurs coaxingly, keeps petting him until his body relaxes and his eyes close. All the tension goes out of his posture, he slumps and doesn't bother to correct himself, and now he allows himself to look down at the tray in front of him and realizes it's full of food and drink: tea, sliced fruit, a bowl of soup, several small colorful objects that he doesn't recognize.

“I brought you supper. Everett wants you to remain here for the night.” Everett, the master who Ivy so callously dishonored. The mention of the name makes bile rise in his throat again, and he shakes his head, remembering how doomed he is, the punishment he deserves for his transgressions.

“That was unkind, what he did. I know. I know what sort of creature you are. You're used to better treatment, aren't you?” Ivy doesn't answer, certain the question is a trap, but nothing seems to be happening at all except the master of the house waiting on him like a slave, speaking to him sweetly and stroking his hair and gazing at him patiently waiting for him to say something and not seeming disappointed when he doesn't.

“My name is Pitt, anyway. Here, try this, you must be thirsty.” He nudges the tray closer, and Ivy picks up the cup of hot tea. It smells spicy and floral, different from the bitter brownish tincture he's used to, and he sips and tastes honey and lemon and something sharp and bright like ginger or cinnamon. He wets his dry lips and tongue, nurses gratefully at the sweetness and heat, feels it course down his throat and warm his stomach.

“Good, isn't it?” Ivy nods, and turns his attention to the fruit, and the strange little bright things which turn out to be small oddly shaped cakes that taste sort of dry and dusty but he devours them all anyway, suddenly starving, and it occurs to him to wonder how long he's been down here. Pitt watches him eat with an air of satisfaction, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his hands on his knees.

“Now where did Everett get his hands on a beauty like you?” Ivy looks at Pitt for a long time, trying to determine whether he's being sincere, and finally decides to answer the question as truthfully as possible.

“He bought me from a brothel in town. A dealer in broken-down slaves had me before that, and sold me to a gentleman, and that's where I ended up.”

“You don't look that broken-down to me.”

“I'm missing an arm. And my wind is ruined.” Ivy is a bit suspicious at this point, wondering what Pitt could possibly be getting at by pretending he doesn't notice the obvious, but the only thing he can do now is answer the man's questions as correctly and concisely as possible and act as if he's utterly unfazed.

“That isn't much of a diagnosis.” Pitt fixes him with a shrewd stare, head cocked to one side and eyebrows drawn together. “I know a doctor. Smart fellow, one of the sharpest minds left in this part of the world. He could look at you, determine if you do have some sort of chronic condition...”

“I don't need doctoring. Begging your pardon, sir. My health is adequate for my master's needs.” Ivy begins to wish that Pitt would go, just leave him alone to curl up in this smelly laundry room and simmer in his disgrace, await whatever punishment Everett will surely have invented for him by morning. He's growing tired of this nonsensical conversation, wants more than anything to be asleep and dreaming of Charlie.

“I think Everett would allow it. I know he would, if I offered him... of course.” Pitt grins, then laughs aloud, slapping Ivy on the shoulder; as if Ivy has any idea why he's laughing, as if they're co-conspirators in some sort of hilarious caper. “Of course! I know how to handle Everett. Don't worry. You stay here, and I'll be back in the morning. What do you fancy for breakfast?”

“Beg your pardon,” Ivy says, and he can't keep the disdain out of his voice, but Pitt only laughs again.

“You're really something,” he says. “Ivy! You're something, you know that?” And at last he leaves, but Ivy can hear him chuckling to himself all the way up the stairs. What a fool, he thinks. A strange man, certainly, a bit lopsided in the head, but it's none of his concern. Still all this talk of a doctor worries him; in his experience, doctors are only needed when someone is gravely ill or injured, or a broodmare is laboring to bring forth her foal. No good can come of summoning a doctor to tend a perfectly healthy slave, that much he knows. He can scarcely lie still, the way his mind is racing, but at last he does manage to close his eyes and doze fitfully, shiveringly, wedged into a corner with his arm wrapped around his knees.


	5. Chapter 5

When he wakes the next morning, one of the female slaves is pawing lightly at his shoulder, entreating shyly for him to open his eyes. It's the one with the darker hair and the gap between her two front teeth, and her breasts are covered now. Her whole body is wrapped in some sort of robelike garment, unornamented and modestly cut but made of a rich and heavy material; silk, Ivy would guess, from the way it drapes and catches the light.

Ivy drags himself upright, heaves his shoulders, tries to roll the kinks out of his back while the girl watches him warily. She has a tray with her, he notices, another generous assortment of tea and fruit and small cakes and a bowl of what appears to be yogurt, and once again Ivy gratefully devours everything that's offered. The slave girl watches him much closer than he's accustomed to being watched while he's eating; like Charlie had when they first met, she views him with a kind of suspicious awe, as if she's never seen anything quite like him before.

“My master is waiting for you upstairs,” she says once he's finished, and Ivy downs the last swallow of the spicy honey-sweet tea and follows the girl back up to the sitting room where Pitt is lounging in what must be his usual chair, and there's the other female waiting on him but no sign of Everett anywhere.

“There you are.” Pitt motions for Ivy to sit down in the chair that Everett had occupied the night before, and the slave girl (the lighter of the two, with freckles and a slightly rounder face) hands him another cup of tea. Ivy drinks, bewildered, and Pitt watches him with a thoughtful expression that makes Ivy more than a little nervous.

“I've sent your master on an errand. We've agreed that I should be the one to punish you, as he has other business to attend to this morning.”

“My actions were inappropriate,” Ivy agrees. “I do deserve punishment.” Pitt actually laughs at this, leans back in his chair and cackles openmouthed at the ceiling, though Ivy hasn't said anything remotely amusing.

“By the Mother, where did you learn to talk like that? Are you a real man at all? Maybe he's mechanical or something. Lilli, tap on his head, will you, see if it sounds hollow.” The darker of the two slave girls laughs demurely, her hand in front of her mouth.

“I was brought up as a slave. My mistress taught me proper etiquette.” Proper etiquette, Ivy thinks, seems to be wasted on most people. Pitt's still looking at him like Ivy's the funniest thing he's ever seen, and both of the girls are giggling now.

“Your mistress was terribly old-fashioned. And Everett, of course, is a fool. Always buying up discards to give himself something to feel virtuous about, when all he does is use them up. Your friend Charlie, for instance. He could have been rehabilitated, retrained as a domestic or even a field laborer, but no, Everett preferred to breed him until his womb gave out.”

“He's-- he's still alive.” Ivy stutters, thrown a bit off-balance by the mention of Charlie. “He won't be discarded again. He's in no danger.”

“You may be right, but I know your master. There have been others.”

“He's still useful. He can't be bred anymore, but he's young and he learns quickly. Everett won't-- he won't hurt Charlie. He won't throw him out.” Ivy's heart has begun to beat rapidly, to thrash and twist in panic, and he knows he shouldn't speak this way, he's contradicted Pitt at least twice, but he has to say the words out loud. He has to tell it to himself, to believe that Charlie won't be harmed.

“I understand you're fond of him.”

“Charlie.”

“Yes. The two of you, you care for each other.”

“I sired a foal on him.” By now Ivy's just about certain that Pitt's trying to trick him somehow, to trap him in some sort of misbehavior that will then necessitate a harsher punishment. He dares not admit what he really feels for Charlie; it's inexplicable, after all, and he certainly didn't choose it himself. He doesn't understand how people grow to be fond of each other, or why it seems to happen at the most inopportune times.

“That's not all. Don't be ashamed, Ivy, you can admit it.”

“I am fond of him. I've slept with him many times, comforted him when he was heavy and weary with foal-carrying. I've done for him everything I knew how to do, because I couldn't-- I can't bear to see him suffer.”

“Yes. The poor thing.” Pitt still seems remarkably cool and amused, remains distant from the trials of Everett's slaves. Ivy's certain he wants something in particular but he doesn't know yet what it is. For all that he brought up the subject in the first place, he isn't really interested in talking about Charlie and his undecided fate. It's Ivy he's interested in, Ivy he wants to extract some sort of confession from, and if Ivy knew what Pitt was waiting to hear, he would say it, but instead he has to endure this halfhearted cross-examination.

“Your mother was a broodmare. How many foals did she bear in her day?”

“I don't know. I was sold when she was still fertile.”

“So you have brothers and sisters you've never met, don't you?”

“Half-brothers, sir. Half only, unless the same stud bred her more than once.” Though the deep-cushioned chair is soft underneath him, Ivy can't get comfortable, and he expends a great deal of effort trying to keep from squirming and fidgeting and crossing and uncrossing his legs and thus demonstrating to Pitt that he's nervous, that he knows he shouldn't be here sipping this tea in a fine chair in a free man's sitting room with beautiful slave girls standing ready to refill his cup. Well, no matter; however Pitt chooses to torment him, he's well-bred enough to endure it with grace.

“Still, they're half your kin. Doesn't that make you curious?”

“Only free men have kin. It's not for me to be curious.” Pitt laughs again, and the dark-haired slave girl leans close to him to whisper something in his ear.

“Well, of course,” he says, and she giggles and hides her face in her hands. “That only depends... Ivy, my friend, do you think you're up to the task?”

“Sir?”

“If you'd oblige me... I'd like to see you perform. Your services as a stud aren't required-- that is, you need not actually impregnate the girl- but if you would mount her a little, show us a bit of what you can do with that marvelous body of yours...” Pitt grins, and reaches out to stroke the girl's bare shoulder. She looks at him fawningly, as if she admires him, and Ivy, watching the two of them, wishes he could refuse Pitt's request. He's sure that at this point it can only incriminate him further.

“You want me to...” The words die in Ivy's throat; he can't speak, either to acquiesce or protest, and the other slave girl pours his cup full again, but he can't drink either. He's filled with a sudden fierce longing for Charlie, for the way they shared each other's warmth in the early morning hours, for the closeness and comfort of their arrangement, the understanding they had with one another. Slaves don't have kin, and they don't have friends, don't have husbands or wives, but Ivy had Charlie and Charlie was something to him.

“It's all right.” Pitt's speaking to him again with that cajoling tone, and his hands are on his slave girl's tits and she's crooning and sighing with pleasure and Ivy knows he has to refuse the offer, he has to disobey, he can't be allowed to touch her.

“Please, sir.”

“Take off your clothes, Ivy. Let us admire you.” This, at least, is easy, and Ivy stands and strips, and everything falls to the floor: the socks, the trousers, the belt and shirt and sweater, until at last he stands before Pitt and the two girls in nothing but the leather collar buckled around his neck. The dark-haired girl touches his shoulder, moves her hand gently over the stump of his missing arm, and his first instinct is to bristle and snarl but he allows the touch, tells himself it's harmless. None of his masters have touched him there, no one wants to confront the truth of his body, not even Charlie or Dane was bold enough to investigate the place where he was so badly wounded so long ago, and the strangeness of it fells him, makes him collapse to his knees.

“It's all right, Ivy. It doesn't hurt anymore, does it?” Pitt touches it as well, palpates the stump with delicately spread fingers, and Ivy tries to imagine what it feels like to someone who isn't accustomed to it. After all these years his truncated limb has come to seem almost ordinary, as if he were born without it.

“Don't touch me,” Ivy blurts out, and he realizes he's gritting his teeth again, his jaws have locked instinctively in an ugly snarl and he's begun to tremble the way he did the day before when he dishonored Everett in front of Pitt and his slaves. He doesn't know what to do now, doesn't know how to regain control of his body or why it's chosen to betray him like this.

“Of course.” Pitt only smiles, and speaks calmly, and withdraws his hands. “You're sensitive. It's understandable. It's quite a difficult thing you've done, learning to live without an arm. You've adapted so well, haven't you? Your movements are so natural and graceful.” The slave girl Lilli, looking somewhat abashed, ventures to touch Ivy again and once more he allows it, her slim little hand over his heart, her soft fingertips stroking his skin. The other girl crouches behind him and together they coax him to lie down on the carpet, which is lovely and soft and cool under his naked body and he's still trembling and he still feels as though something is wrong but maybe for a little while he can allow himself to forget.

“There, that's right.” Pitt keeps talking to him, and talking to the girl, and she mounts Ivy and grasps his cock and guides it into herself and rides it until he comes and he can't bring himself to enjoy it.

He's still thinking of Charlie, his last desperate days of foal-carrying when he crawled on his hands and knees and howled with the pain in his guts, when he was so pale and sweaty and strained that Ivy could hardly stand to look at him. Ivy had stayed by his side then, and he knows that's where he belongs now; though why he should feel such fierce loyalty towards a fellow slave and none at all for the man who owns them both is quite beyond his understanding.

There are further indignities to be suffered in Everett's absence: a doctor arrives to examine Ivy, pronounces him asthmatic and rubs some kind of pungent oily solution all over his chest. He and Pitt confer for a long time, draft a list of remedies and cautions that Ivy's sure Everett won't read. When at last Everett does return, Ivy's actually grateful. They return to the road and continue, north along the river into the high country, through strange blasted territories that don't seem much inhabited. Ivy's lived all his life in the Merrimack Kingdom, knows nothing of the world beyond it except that it's barren and treacherous, full of snakepits and craters and quarries, its waters muddied, its mountainsides stripped of trees.

The weather turns gray, but Ivy breathes easier, as if Pitt's doctor and all his prodding and peering and chest-rubbing have actually done him good. The road is stony and empty and Everett doesn't talk much, doesn't ask much of Ivy, and when the sun goes down they huddle in the wagon bed to sleep, wrapped in their separate blankets.

Ivy grows nervous, begins to avoid Everett's gaze, to avoid looking at him, though they take their meals together and ride together on the wagon buckboard and sleep side by side every night. He remains resolutely bundled in his own blanket, becomes convinced that he shouldn't allow Everett to touch him, and Everett doesn't try. They stay only one night in the city, which is as Ivy remembers it; great buildings half-abandoned and tumbled to earth, vast mazes of market stalls shaded under roofs of tin and plywood and canvas, horse-drawn carts and automobiles jostling side by side down the rutted streets. Everett purchases linens and furs and ornaments, many uncommon luxuries, and a new pair of boots for Ivy made of finely polished red-orange leather. As they turn back onto the road to begin the plodding journey home, Ivy knows he should be content but he feels as if something is amiss; as if he'll return to his master's house and his duties and his little room behind the kitchen to find that not everything is as he left it.

As soon as the wagon turns in at the gate, Ivy knows what's missing. Dane comes out to put away the horses, and he looks solemn, almost mournful. Ivy calls out to him, and all he does is shake his head and cast a sorry glance over his shoulder before he drives the team away. In Ivy's room the bed is freshly made and the covers turned down, but the scent of Charlie is gone; there's no trace of him anywhere, not so much as a hair left on the pillow.

Everett is in his parlor, seated in his favorite chair reading a book, one of his women- Caroline, the tall dark one-- kneeling at his feet. Ivy startles them both when he comes reeling into the room, and the woman looks up, gives him a distinctly pitying glance before casting her eyes down again. Everett is smiling for some reason, and he reaches out with one arm, gestures for Ivy to come closer.

“Where is he?” Ivy manages to speak calmly, though his heart feels like it's bursting and he can hardly see through the blotchy red haze that's lowered itself over his field of vision. He's gone numb, trembling, freezing cold, and he wants to do harm to Everett more than he's ever wanted anything in his life but Everett is still his master and Ivy can't bring himself to raise a hand against him.

“Who?”

“Charlie. Where is Charlie?”

“Oh, your broodmare. I thought it was time you finished with all that. Moved on from your shallow infatuation.” Everett licks his fingers, very slowly and deliberately turns the page of his book, pretending not to notice all Ivy's heaving and trembling. I could ruin him, Ivy thinks, I'm still strong enough, I can tear him limb from limb but at the same time I never could. What kind of life would I live after that? How could I forgive myself?

“You sold him.”

“Master, I think--” Caroline interrupts, and is immediately shushed by Everett, his careless hand over her mouth. She kneels again, shaking her head, her arms crossed over her chest, and Everett strokes her hair as if she were a pet cat, still not deigning to look in Ivy's direction.

“I had no more use for him. It's a pity, isn't it, that he's come to the end of his working life. Quite young, wasn't he? Still, there's hope for you. Now why don't you go back to your room and rest, I know traveling doesn't agree with you.”

“You've sentenced him to death.” Ivy steps closer, looms above Everett in his chair. “Why did you take him in the first place if you were only going to throw him away?”

“Never you mind about that. Now leave me and go to your room, Ivy. I won't tell you again.” Ivy is no longer the good slave, no longer the strong and steadfast and obedient creature that his mother raised him to be. He's an animal backed into a corner, fighting for the life of his mate and his young. He descends on Everett with teeth and claws, scrabbling and scraping and biting and throttling for all he's worth. Everett's screams bring the rest of the household, including Dane, and Ivy's vaguely aware of Dane pulling at his arm and jabbing at his ribs, trying to pry him off their master. Ivy turns his head and gnashes his teeth at him, and Dane's eyes find his for a moment and the terror in them is strangely gratifying.

Finally they succeed in pulling him off Everett, the two female slaves holding his arm and Dane at his other side grasping him by the shoulder, and Ivy faces his master, head lowered and chest heaving. He'd torn Everett's shirt and scratched his face rather badly, and looking at the damage he wrought fills him with a very dangerous and unaccustomed sense of pride.

“You,” Everett spits; he reaches out with one hand, grasps the collar around Ivy's neck and uses it to jerk his head back. “How dare you behave so shamefully! You're no better than a beast, are you?” Ivy heaves his shoulders and strains his back and succeeds in pulling himself out of Everett's grip; Dane's is beginning to loosen as well, he's strong but not stronger than Ivy's fury and wounded pride, a lifetime's worth of violent urges he's been trained to tamp down and keep hidden. Every time he's been ill-treated, every injury he's received through malice or carelessness, all the injustice of his lifetime of uncomplaining servitude has risen to the surface, and it's just bad luck that Everett is the one who's brought this out of him.

“You threw him away,” Ivy pants; gathering his strength, preparing to hurl himself at Everett again. “Charlie. You don't care if he lives or dies.”

“Neither should you. I do as I please with my own possessions. You and your broodmare belong to me.” Everett touches Ivy's cheek, strokes it, the touch of his fingertips oddly tender and loving. “I think it's time I fucked you now. I think you've gone too long without performing any useful service.” He slaps Ivy's face with the hand that had just caressed it, and Ivy ducks out of Dane's grasp and falls to the floor, wrenching his arm away from Caroline who yelps and leaps clear as Ivy rolls back onto his feet and lunges towards her.

“I don't belong to you,” Ivy hears himself say. It's no longer his voice that he hears speaking, but the voice of someone wiser and stronger; a free man, a man who would never allow the mother of his child to be sold away and scrapped for parts, a man who would feel no compunctions about throwing Everett to the floor and kicking the shit out of him for what he's done.

“You do, Ivy. I paid for you, brought you into my home, fed and clothed and sheltered you. A sad state of affairs, that this is what my generosity has earned me.” At that moment Ivy feels something curious, a small sharp pain in the side of his neck, a sensation of some cold fluid being inserted under his skin. He has just enough time to notice the other female slave standing beside him with an empty plastic syringe in her hand before his field of vision fractures into a bunch of disjointed shards of color and light, and he collapses heavily to his knees.

Ivy wakes in the master's bed, and at first all he can see is his arm lying splayed out beside him on the mattress, and it's odd because he can see it but try as he might he can't move it, and when he tries he discovers he can't move his head or his neck either, or indeed anything else. He feels a creeping chill just under his skin, like the blood in his veins has been replaced with ice water. He tries to move his mouth, to speak, and his lips and jaws move a little bit but his tongue appears to be frozen.

“There now.” Everett's voice, and he can't see Everett but he's nearby, his hand is on Ivy's collar again, pulling on it, dragging Ivy's head up so that his eyes-- all but immobile- are aimed at the ceiling. It's the familiar pressed-tin ceiling of Everett's bedroom, molded with leaves and flowers, but somehow the sight of it is terrifying, and Ivy can't close his eyes to shut it out. “We're past all that foolishness, aren't we? I can see you're going to behave yourself.” Ivy moves his numb lips, feels the strange sensation of them sliding wetly over his teeth, but he still can't make a sound, and his eyes must register fear because Everett laughs and raises a hand and slaps him again, hard enough to make his cheek sting through the cold-fleshed living-corpse haze of whatever drug he's been injected with.

“Do you doubt it now? Do you believe that you belong to me?” Ivy, gazing down the length of his own body, realizes he's naked except for his collar. There's his chest, its sparse scattering of dark hair, his belly and protruding hipbones, his pale bristly thighs and his cock lying flaccid between them. He feels uncannily like a marionette, like he's waiting for Everett to take hold of his strings, lift him up and make him dance. He tries to shake his head, and very nearly manages it, rocking back and forth and turning it infinitesimally from side to side on the pillow that's been placed underneath. He grunts, a graceless preverbal exclamation of dismay, when Everett sits down beside him and strokes his hair.

That's when Dane enters the room, the heavy iron coal shovel from the fireplace held across his shoulder, and as Ivy watches in disbelief he lifts it high over his head and brings it down resoundingly on Everett's, a spectacular wet-sounding impact that sends blood fountaining into the air and Everett sprawling backwards off the bed, and it seems to Ivy to happen in slow motion. He can see Everett's eyes roll up into his head, can see his head sway on his neck and his arms jerk up automatically as he crumples to the floor. Then he's just lying there, unconscious, blood leaking from the wound at the base of his skull, and Ivy can't tell if he's breathing.

“Dane.” Ivy can speak now, a little, can at the very least push air past his teeth in a way that resembles words, and the numbness in his lips and tongue is receding slowly, replaced by a kind of prickling sensation. Dane crouches down and holds two fingers to Everett's throat to check his pulse. Ivy's never seen him look so sad, or so serious.

“Is he?” Ivy manages to ask, and Dane shakes his head, sits down beside him, repeats the pulse-checking maneuver on Ivy's neck.

“You'll be like this for at least another hour,” he says. “Unless I can find something to counteract the poison. You've been given a small dose, but it's all right. You won't die, or even feel that much pain. Won't be able to move until it wears off, though, and that's the part that worries me.”

“The girls...”

“Caroline and Mathilde have been taken care of for now. They have no reason to defend him.” He jerks his head at Everett, still lying splay-limbed and insensate on the floor. “ I'll set them free when we leave. I don't know where they'll go, but women always find a way. They won't suffer either.” Dane glances around the room, gives Ivy a pat on the shoulder that he still can't feel. He pulls out the drawers of Everett's bedside table one by one, stands up and moves swiftly on to the chest of drawers, then the closet, pulling everything out and strewing it over the floor. There are many small plastic medicine bottles, most with their labels torn off, and Dane examines and rejects each one in turn.

“Nothing here. Useless, useless. Well, I hope you're comfortable, old man.” He smiles the sly-fox smile Ivy's come to recognize and sits down beside him again. “Just a little longer. I'll stay with you if you like.” Despite everything, Ivy's thoughts have retained a strange clarity. This is a remote farmhouse, well outside the town, miles away from the nearest neighbor, seldom visited. It'll be a while before anyone realizes what's happened to Everett.

“He didn't fuck you, did he?” Dane's touching him again, that slim hand on his shoulder, quite strong for its size, giving him a possessive squeeze. “He doesn't deserve to touch you. By the way, there's something I need to tell you. I mean, he told me, but he didn't think you ought to know, so I kept my mouth shut.”

Ivy looks up at Dane and raises his eyebrows imploringly. Dane settles in beside him, propping his back against the headboard of the bed, crooking his arm and resting his elbow on Ivy's chest.

“He's your father. Everett. He's the one who sired you.” Ivy shakes his head again, not disbelieving but wishing it weren't the truth, remembering all too well the house of his old mistress and those nights when Everett would come to court her. He hadn't wanted to imagine it, Everett and his mother, hadn't wanted to admit that he'd seen them dance together, sway hand in hand, Cinnamon with her bare breasts and her wine-stained lips, her slim body wilting in Everett's arms.

“It's all right, old man.” By now Ivy can feel Dane's hand on his shoulder, his gentle rubbing and stroking. “Look, he's dead now. Well, not exactly dead, but nearly, and I'm in no hurry to send for the doctor.” Dane laughs, and Ivy does the only thing he can do, which is lie stiff on his back like a corpse and wait for the poison he was given to move through his blood.

Once Ivy regains the use of his limbs, things move very quickly. He and Dane ransack Everett's room for anything the slightest bit useful, money and clothes and jewelry and a few official-looking papers written in an old-fashioned script that neither of them can read. They take what they can from the kitchen as well, parcels of cheese and bread and cured sausage and fruit, everything they can carry, and the girls- huddling together in the attic, Ivy shudders to think of what Dane's been threatening them with-- are freed and instructed very sternly to tell no one what they've witnessed. It's very nearly a clean getaway, but Ivy is still uneasy. Everett's not quite dead, he's going to come to and when he does nothing can stop him from hunting them down.


	6. Chapter 6

They cross the stream at the bottom of the far paddock, and Ivy follows Dane because he seems to know where he's going. He moves confidently, his head held high, his steps firm even though unlike Ivy he hasn't been provided with proper footwear; he's barefoot now, having forsaken his heavy old mud-caked work boots. He doesn't tire for a long time, and Ivy trails after him, unwilling to complain but uncertain of their destination. There's a town somewhere on the other side of the woods, and roads that lead to cities, thousands of them scattered all over the kingdoms and the vast territories, and how are they going to find Charlie in all that inhospitable distance? They don't have the slightest idea where he's gone, where Everett sold him off to. Neither of them were there to see him being taken away, and Ivy feels something uncomfortably like despair when he thinks of the task that faces them: remaining undiscovered while searching high and low for a worthless broodmare who, as far as they know, has already been discarded.

Night falls and at last Dane seems to be growing weary. They're still in the middle of the woods and for all Ivy knows they've been going in circles, but he'll be grateful at least to lie down and rest, satisfied that they've put a respectable distance between themselves and their former master. Dane lies down among the roots of a great sycamore tree and Ivy lies down beside him and gazes up at its branches, slim and ghostly against the lowering twilight sky. He watches the stars emerge one by one like bright silver pins stuck into a cloak of soft gray wool, and somehow their presence is comforting. He scratches in the soft earth between the tree's roots, pulls a blanket of fallen leaves over himself, lets Dane clutch and cling to his side like he did in the basement cell where they'd drowsed away the cold days and nights together.

“Charlie isn't the only one he damaged,” Dane says, just as Ivy's drifting off to sleep. 

“What?”

“Feel this.” Dane grabs for Ivy's hand, pulls it to the opening of his trousers. Ivy's fingers probe, press lightly, encounter Dane's familiar cock and beneath it an unfamiliar scar, a row of hasty stitches where his balls used to be. Dane's been castrated, and he must still be in great pain, but throughout this ordeal he's managed to show none of it.

Ivy snatches his hand back as if he's been burned, and Dane laughs, or more accurately snorts, one low dismayed syllable that hangs heavy on the stillness of the night. It's amazing how silent everything is, how Ivy can hear nothing but the faint chittering of frogs in the marshes down by the river. No human sounds out here but his breathing and Dane's, which sounds as though it's going to devolve into sobs at any moment. Ivy speaks softly to him, tries to comfort him, offers Dane his shoulder to rest his head on. 

“Go to sleep,” he says. “It won't hurt as much tomorrow.”

“It's not the pain.”

“Slaves are gelded all the time. It's very fashionable in the big cities. You were lucky to remain intact for as long as you did. After all, you were a prisoner--”

“By the teeth of the Mother!” Dane turns away from Ivy, slumps moodily on his side with his arms around himself. “Sometimes I wonder if you even have a brain in your head. Sometimes I wonder why I'd ever bother talking to a big stupid ox like you.”

“Oxen are gelded. They can't reproduce.”

“Shut up, will you?” Ivy pats Dane's shoulder in what he hopes is a conciliatory fashion, and Dane sighs, then whimpers, then starts to sob quietly. Ivy rubs and strokes and pets him until he falls asleep. They dream side by side until morning, when the cacophony of birds in the branches overhead grows too loud to be ignored.

All that first day they meet no one, and speak little enough to each other. Ivy notices that Dane walks with a limp. He slows his own pace to match Dane's, stops often to drink water from a skin flask of Everett's that used to hold wine. At nightfall they come to a curious ruin, the basement of a house still divided by its interior walls, full of waterlogged debris and rusty tangles of pipe. Ivy climbs down to take a look, sifts through the piles of rotten wood and fragments of sheetrock and moldy old clothes for anything that might still be useful.

“There's probably snakes down there,” Dane calls from up above. He's sitting on the edge of the pit, idly drumming his heels against the side. His feet are still bare; he ought to have a pair of shoes. Ivy shifts a bundle of warped plastic pipes, uncovers the rusted remnants of a washing machine. The round porthole door in the front still opens, and inside are a pair of sneakers. A bit crumpled and torn, missing their laces, but otherwise utterly pristine, rubber soles intact and glowing white. He feels strangely as if someone's left them here for him to find, someone who's been watching him and Dane from the beginning, providing for them, ensuring the success of their escape.

“Snakes in there for sure,” Dane's yelling. “Probably a whole nest of them in that box. They like little spaces like that.”

“No snakes.” Ivy removes the shoes from their hiding place and climbs back up to Dane, who accepts the offering with gratitude and evident pleasure and loses no time in sliding them onto his feet. They move on through the woods, making more occasional and useful discoveries, collecting abandoned caches of food and water and sometimes wine or beer or liquor sealed and buried in glass bottles. In another abandoned house Ivy comes across a weapon in good condition, a long sharp blade, slightly curved, attached to a well-worn wooden handle. A machete, Dane calls it. He'd used something like it before, in his other life, to kill chickens and chop wood and clear brush. Ivy lets him carry it; something about the thing, its well-balanced weight and shiny lethality, the ease with which it fits in his hand, unsettles him a bit. He's still privately grateful that Dane's the one who struck Everett, that Ivy himself never caused him any serious injury. At the same time he can imagine himself straddling Everett's chest and wrapping his hand around the old man's throat and squeezing and throttling and forcing his weight against the vulnerable life-sustaining tubes until they constrict and the eyes roll up into the skull and bloody froth spills from the slack and silent mouth.

Dane is still easy in his presence, treats Ivy as he always has, isn't afraid to lie close to him at night, to touch him slyly and solicitously, to sneak one or both hands into his trousers and grasp and stroke and rub him until he comes. Ivy allows this, but he never ministers to Dane in return, no longer feels any desire to mount him or rub against him or fuck his mouth. He doesn't know if he's mourning for Charlie or fears being captured or still feels guilty for turning against Everett, but Dane seems to understand and accept the change in him, doesn't press him for more than he can give.

Thanks to Dane's knowledge of back ways and deer paths and disused cart trails, they meet no one in the course of their flight, and Ivy's fear and guilt gradually give way to lonesomeness and discomfort. Dane is lively, as always, never leaves off talking, but Ivy is irritable from sleeping poorly and sour-stomached from bad rations and seldom in the mood to listen to him. Dane is used to traveling, to making the most of things wherever he finds himself, but even as a small boy Ivy wanted nothing more than to stay in one place, to tread one familiar path over and over again. Familiar faces and unchangeable routine, a warm bed to sleep in and a warm mate to share it with, and that was what he'd had when they lived with Everett.

“We have to go back,” Ivy tells Dane, as they huddle together through another fireless night. “We can't keep hiding here. We'll never find Charlie.”

“I told you. We can't risk looking for Charlie. We'll be caught and dragged off to prison, or publicly beheaded, or burned at the stake. If we go back to town... well, everyone there knows you, don't they? The big one-armed stud. You're about the farthest thing there is from inconspicuous.”

“We have to do something. He could be there now. What if Everett's sold him back to the brothel, or the scrap yard, or...” Ivy knows that Dane's right, that too many people are too familiar with the sight of him in the town where he grew up, where his old mistress and his mother once lived. Still he can't live like this forever, in hiding, slinking through the woods, keeping away from the roads and paths, traveling by moonlight and sleeping the days away. He's not an outlaw, after all; he's still a good slave, in spite of all he's done and witnessed, and he certainly deserves better than this.

“It doesn't matter. You have to forget him. You don't know what could happen to us if we're found out. You don't want to know. Trust me, you can't imagine it.” Ivy finds this a bit presumptuous, but he lets it pass. There's no doubt that they'll be made an example of if they're ever formally charged with attacking Everett, after all. Ivy's seen such things before, the spectacle of public execution, slaves and criminals hanged until half-dead and then torn limb from limb, stoned and flayed and beaten with leaden whips; really they'll be lucky to be beheaded, but Ivy finds himself fearing death less than the prospect of a life in hiding.

“He's my mare. I can't leave him.”

“There it is again. You're not animals, you know. You're a man, and so is Charlie, even if nobody treats him like one. Enough of this mare and stud nonsense. I know you, Ivy, I know you're a lot less stupid than you pretend to be. Everett-- you knew Everett was your father, you knew and you just didn't want to think about it, so you didn't. You know we're better off without Charlie, but you don't want to think about that either, so you--”

“You're the one who hit our master with the coal shovel. Why would you strike him down like that if you don't care about Charlie?”

“I don't care about Charlie. I was trying to keep you from being raped by your own father.”

“He's not my father.”

“Of course he is. He impregnated your mother, didn't he? Someone has to be your father. Just your bad luck that it's him, but that's the way it is. I never knew my mother or my father, I never had a family, and you did but you'd rather deny it, wouldn't you? You'd rather go on pretending you're livestock, but you're not. You're a man, and you're free now, and if you want to stay that way you'd best forget about Charlie. Forget him, go on with your life as if he's already dead.”  
“I can't do that.”

“Of course you can.”

“I can't let him go. I'm too fond of him.”

“Now there's a strange notion. You love him, don't you?”

“Slaves aren't permitted to love.”

“See! There you are again. Don't you see that none of this makes sense?”

“If I were a man, a free man, and if Charlie were...” Ivy hesitates, turning the words over carefully in his mind. “If he were my wife, or whatever free men have, then wouldn't I be a coward not to go after him? Wouldn't I have to be willing to give my life for him, if it were necessary?”

“He's not your wife, you see? He's nothing more to you than a convenient hole to stick your cock in. I hate to say it, but Everett was right about that. He served his purpose, now you have to let him go.”

“I ought to let you go instead.”

“Now what are you talking about?”

“I don't need you to come with me.” Dane snorts and tosses his head and turns his back on Ivy, cursing mutteringly to himself. His whole body is stiff with anger, and Ivy can feel him shaking, but when he speaks again his voice is low and steady.

“Go on then. Get yourself killed, I don't care. He's not worth your life, but there's nothing I can do. I suppose you could at least thank me for saving you from Everett before you go off to get your guts ripped out by a howling mob. You owe me that much.” Ivy says nothing, but he pushes his back against Dane's and Dane doesn't move away from him again. Finally they sleep, wrapped in the same blanket, Dane's anger warming them both.

The next morning Ivy wakes alone, as he expected, but Dane hasn't gone far. He's sitting up against the trunk of a nearby tree, chewing on the heel of a loaf of bread and looking extremely dour. Ivy's never seen him look so grim; indeed it's such an unaccustomed sight that he almost wants to laugh. Ivy forages in the canvas sack of provisions for his own breakfast and sits down beside Dane, and neither of them speak. Then Dane stands up, hoists his pack and squares his shoulders decisively.

“Well. Come on, will you?”

“What?”

“We're going back to town. I'll help you find Charlie.”

“You said--”

“I remember what I said. I won't let you go alone. I know I'm not your wife or anything, but I like you. I'll help you as much as I can.”

“You're right. About what you did to our master. I owe you a debt of gratitude.” Ivy slings his pack over his shoulder, shakes off night and sleep and all his doubts about the days to come, all thoughts of the impossibility of the task that lies before them and the home they've left behind. Their lives with Everett were perfectly unremarkable, almost pleasant; certainly better than anything Ivy thought he could have, in the poor condition he was in when they were acquired. If Everett hadn't sold Charlie they could have gone on, the three of them, laboring in the fields and the barn and the kitchen and returning to the same bed to sleep companionably each night.

Ivy follows Dane, trusts that he knows the way, and only now does he regret that he's hardly ever left the town where he was born and raised, that he has no sense of direction to speak of. He's almost like a blind man, needing to be guided everywhere, unable to tell one grove of trees from another, one curve of leaf-strewn path from the next. They make their way back to the road, which isn't much traveled, but one morning they meet with a traveler, a gentleman in a marvelous skin coat astride a pretty little black pony. He's alone, and Ivy hails him while Dane hides in the brush. He tries to carry himself like a free man, to hold his head high, and the stranger hails him in return and doesn't appear to notice anything amiss. Just as the man is about to turn his horse's head back towards the road and continue on his way, Ivy's stricken with a sudden inspiration.

“May I make a request of you, stranger?”

“Only a very hasty one. I have a long way to travel.”

“I'm searching for a broodmare who belongs to my household. A tall one, with cropped hair and dark eyes. A brown spot here on her face.” He touches his cheek just where Charlie has a small irregular cluster of moles. “Along the way you've traveled, have you seen a creature like that?”

“Has she run off? Your mare?” The stranger leans toward Ivy with new interest, as if he suspects a scandal. “I have seen one fitting that description. A lovely tall girl with quite a fine pair of tits on her. If she is yours, you'd best go claim her, I'm afraid.”

“I knew it!” Dane leaps out of the bushes, startling the horse, who snorts and stamps restively until Ivy catches the bridle and brings its head down. The stranger, once he's regained his balance and his dignity, turns to Dane with an odd look of recognition. Dane steps forward, and Ivy stands well out of his way.

“Dane Morrison? What are you doing wandering the earth? Is this the sort of company you're keeping these days?”

“Never mind that. You've just come from the House in the Woods, haven't you?”

“You're after this broodmare as well?”

“She's rather an important asset. The favorite of my master, here, as it happens.” Ivy looks around for Everett before realizing that Dane is gesturing to him, that he has to pose as the master. In his new boots and well-mended clothes, he very nearly looks the part. He draws himself up to his full height, which he knows is impressive; though, being a slave, he's more often been called looming and brutish.

“So you've got a new master after all.” The stranger considers Ivy again, gives him a look of appraisal that's far more respectful than what he's used to, and maybe even somewhat awed. “I told you you'd do all right for yourself, didn't I? Well, now, I have to know, how'd you talk this one into--”

“Please,” Ivy interrupts, his hand on the horse's neck. “Tell us about the mare. If you know where she is.” Ivy barely keeps himself from calling the man 'sir', from falling on his knees in the soft leaf litter and groveling, begging the stranger for whatever he can offer, the merest hint or clue, any indication at all of where Charlie might have gone. The House in the Woods, wasn't that what he'd said? Ominous, indecisive, intentionally vague, but still, if Dane knows the place...

“I've just come from the House in the Woods. I had a slave girl, said she was a former broodmare. Tall, dark eyes and short hair like you said. I don't remember the spot, but I didn't study her face very closely.” He gathers up the reins and heels his pony to a walk, then a trot, calling farewell to Dane as he disappears over the next rise, dust and stones and dry leaves scattering in his wake.

“That's it,” Dane says. He turns and darts back into the woods, and Ivy follows him, elated and confused but too out of breath to demand any explanation.


	7. Chapter 7

Some time after Ivy and the master have left, after Dane's gone out to the back paddock to feed the horses, after the first batch of bed linens have been washed and hung from the line to dry, two men arrive at the front door. There's nothing different about them, they aren't unusually dressed, they're ordinary in every way but Charlie knows at once that they're here for him. They're going to take him, he knows it, he won't be allowed to stay here, he's been too lucky for too long and now his luck has run out. The master has sold him, because he's worthless, because the only part of his body that was any use at all has been cut out and discarded and now he deserves nothing more than to be pulled apart and sold as individual components.

Caroline, one of the master's women, opens the door, and she speaks to the men for a while and they point to Charlie and talk in low voices and she turns and beckons him and he comes to the door and stands there while they look him up and down.

“Good lord, he was right,” says one. “Not a lot left here, but we can get enough out of her. Come on then, Bessie.” Charlie wants to say that he isn't a cow anymore, that he never was, that he no longer crawls on all fours and cringes and wallows in his own filth like an animal, but he knows it's not what he was meant for. He knows he isn't supposed to stand like this, to wear clothes like a free man, to despise the creature that he was before he knew better than to allow men to use him for whatever purpose they saw fit. He doesn't say anything, and one of the men ties a heavy rope around his neck and they lead him down the path away from the house. Caroline closes the door behind them. Dane is still in the paddock, Ivy and the master gone down the road, and no one will allow Charlie to escape his fate now.

The men lead him not back into town but in the opposite direction, where Charlie thought there was nothing but farms and rocky hills and sparse woods, and at last they arrive at a tall old house with a rickety porch wrapping all the way around it and a high steep roof shedding shingles and rotten front steps that creak and groan as they pass, the three of them, and inside is a parlor with rugs and furniture and a fireplace like the master's but shabbier, practically ruined, though by the look of it this was once a fine house. Finer than Everett's, and finer than any that Charlie has ever seen, but this is very little comfort, and he's thrown to his knees and kicked in the side and lies gasping on the moldy carpet while the two men... well, he can't see them, he doesn't know where they've gone.

He lies there for a while, he doesn't know how long exactly, and then one of the men reappears with another he doesn't recognize, and this new one is tall and pale and wearing blue jeans and a white shirt and round wire-rimmed glasses, and he crouches down next to Charlie and unties the rope from his neck.

“Hello there, little one,” he says, and his voice is kind, and his hands are light where they rest on Charlie's shoulders, and they find the buttons of his shirt and undo them quickly and soon Charlie's lying there stripped to the waist, his arms trembling uselessly at his sides. He tries to move, to sit up, to raise his arms to cover himself, but he's paralyzed with fear and nothing he can do will make the slightest bit of difference. This is the end of him, he knows now, what he'd feared he would come to when his first master sold him.

“All right.” The man's pulling Charlie's trousers off, and only when he's naked is he finally able to command his arms to rise and cross on his chest and hide what's left of his tits from view. He's still trembling, and it takes both men to pry his legs apart and keep them spread as the one with the glasses feels inside Charlie's cunt with two fingers.

“Well, this isn't good,” he says, and his voice is low and sympathetic. “The damn thing's all bunged up with scar tissue. Trying to reopen it would just cause a lot of unnecessary trauma at this point.”

“You mean the removal of the reproductive organs--”

“Right, whatever clumsy bastard did it really butchered the poor critter. Her birth canal's basically useless at this point.”

“Let me go,” Charlie blurts out; he doesn't know he's decided to speak until he hears the words, his own voice sounding especially quavery and pathetic to his ears. “I want to go-- I need to wait for Ivy, he's going to come back, I need to wait for him--”

“It's all right there, sweetheart. We're gonna take care of you now.” The man with the glasses rubs Charlie's thigh reassuringly, keeps probing gently at the mass of scar tissue between his legs. It hurts, but in a very distant and unimportant way. What is important is that Charlie has to leave, that someone has to tell Ivy where he's gone. Ivy's going to come home and find his bed empty, and he's going to wonder, and... really, this can't happen, Charlie can't be sold off like this. He pleads his case until he can't speak anymore, and then he starts to cry, still clutching himself, feeling the shuddering of his rib cage as he takes long gasping breaths, and the man with the glasses clucks to him and strokes his hair and after a while Charlie cries himself to sleep.

Then he wakes, his body heavy and aching, and he's in a dim room lying on a straw mattress that actually isn't all that uncomfortable. He's still naked but there are blankets piled over him now, and he can see several more mattresses arranged in rows, none of them occupied. He feels hazy and warm with sleep and he presses a hand between his legs but when he touches himself there's the same pain, a feeling of resistance, an immovable scarred mass sealing shut the opening that had brought forth his foals. At least there's that small comfort, that his new masters won't be able to force anything into it. He hasn't felt or looked at himself since the surgery, hasn't put his fingers there, hasn't tried to come.

Charlie strokes himself again, and this time he imagines his fingers are Ivy's tongue, passing gently over the small knob of flesh above his calving hole; or rather, not his calving hole, but the flexible opening that once functioned as his birth canal, that Ivy taught him to call his cunt. It was Ivy who showed him its other uses, how Charlie could take his own pleasure from a man's cock or tongue or fingers pressing inside him.

Most importantly, Ivy had shown him kindness, was gentle and patient with him as no one else had ever been. No one else had ever bothered to kiss his mouth or stroke his sides or nibble softly at his neck, none of the men who fucked him had ever even tried to make him come and Charlie didn't know that he could do it until Ivy brought it out of him; that day by the hearth with Everett, Ivy had licked him to such a wet and messy climax that Charlie was afraid he'd pissed on the floor. Not all broodmares are able to come like that, Ivy told him later. Sometimes their masters remove the little knot of flesh and the other soft parts around their holes so they won't be distracted by pleasurable sensations when their studs mount and breed them. Charlie, as it turns out, is lucky.

Really not so lucky anymore, he thinks, and he keeps moving his fingers over his clit but all he feels is the same dull ache, expanding and contracting with his heartbeat which he can feel following the lines of the surgeon's knife. Charlie's hand stills, withdraws and rests limply on his belly, and for a long time he just lies there wondering if it's time he gave up on his life, if any good can still come of his continuing to draw breath.

Then the door opens and a woman enters with an armful of clothes, and she rousts Charlie out of bed. She's young, and would be pretty if it weren't for the shiny red scar tissue covering most of her face. It's as if someone's tried to boil her alive, and her hair is cunningly arranged to hide what Charlie imagines must be a wrinkly expanse of bare scalp. She seems unashamed, however, and she speaks briskly and with authority.

“Here, put these on. There's a gentleman here to make a selection, and you may as well start earning your keep.” There's a long loose garment like a skirt made of something thin and gauzy, and a scarf or shawl with silk tassels, and a collection of jangly bracelets and rings. Charlie dresses, or more accurately stands like a very skinny and uncertain statue while the woman rushes around him draping fabric and clasping chains. There's a fine chain for his neck, with a small gold medallion hanging from it, and this, he's told, has the proprietary mark of the master of the house, which itself has no name.

“The House in the Woods. That's what it's called, most often, but it's better never to mention it at all. Gentlemen don't mention it. It doesn't need a name.” Waving her hands, she shoos Charlie back out into the parlor, which is now full of women; female slaves of widely varying ages and sizes and states of decrepitude. Some appear to be worn-out former broodmares like him, skinny and sad with their tits hanging empty and their bellies slack and wobbling above the waistbands of their flimsy skirts. Some, like Ivy, are missing a limb; some, unlike him, are missing an eye or an ear or a breast. All of them are women, and Charlie feels as though there's been some mistake.

“I don't belong here,” he says, and the one with the scar pretends not to hear him. “I'm not like them. I'm not a girl.”

“Well.” She laughs softly, but there's something like kindness in it; for some reason Charlie doesn't feel entirely as if she's mocking him. “You're certainly not a man, are you?”

“I don't know.” Maybe he's not exactly like a man, maybe he can't grow a beard or fell a tree or impregnate a woman, but at the very least he isn't a girl. His shoulders are broad and his hips are narrow and before he started starving he'd had good firm muscles in his arms and chest and back. His voice is deep enough, and he's tall, and his upper lip is covered in small soft hairs. He's enough like a man that anyone who comes to the House in the Woods looking for a slave girl to fuck is going to find him disappointing.

“Don't be stupid,” is all the woman says, before she shoves him off with instructions to find a chair or a couch to sit on and try not to look too unattractive. Charlie props himself on a broken-down bench in the corner and tries to find a way to arrange the slinky shawl around his neck so that it more or less covers his tits. He looks around the room, and just as he's begun to wonder where the gentleman is, some tall creature extravagantly draped in fur enters from the opposite door. A man, wearing a fabulous coat of spotted skins, and a striped vest, and dark trousers, and boots.

The gentleman roams about the room for a while, stopping here or there to prod disinterestedly at one reclining slave girl or another. Casually, his hands in the pockets of his great fur coat, he approaches Charlie.

“You're an odd one,” he says. “Broodmare? You were, weren't you. How many times have you been bred?”

“Five times,” Charlie answers, truthfully. The man takes him by the arm and pulls him to his feet. He lifts the scarf aside to investigate Charlie's tits, seems to find them satisfactory; they droop a great deal more than they used to, but they're still round and soft and smooth-skinned with rather small and delicate nipples. Charlie looks down, concentrating very hard on the spattering of freckles on his own chest, while the gentleman weighs his tits in both hands, squeezing them firmly as if assessing the ripeness of a pair of peaches.

“You're remarkable,” he says. “Five births, and your tits are still lovely as anything. All broodmares ought to be more like you. How old are you, girl?”

“I don't know. More than twenty.” Charlie wants to correct the man, to point out once more that he isn't a girl, that he hasn't ever been a girl, though when he was very young of course people could be excused for thinking he was one.

“I want you. Come upstairs with me.” Charlie walks at the man's side, follows him up the long staircase to a dark little room at the top of the house. Like his and Ivy's room behind Everett's kitchen, it has a single window and a narrow bed and very little else. The ceiling slopes, and the curtains hang in gauzy tatters. The man takes off his skin coat and his vest, and Charlie shrugs gratefully out of his borrowed finery. He's apprehensive, thinking of what will happen when the man discovers he can no longer be fucked in the traditional sense. As always, he's more defective than he appears at first to be.

“You're not like the rest of those wrecks down there,” the man says, pawing at Charlie's tits again. “You're still young and beautiful. What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I was sold. I used to have a master, and a room, and a bed to sleep in, with...” Charlie hesitates, not sure how to speak of Ivy, what to call him. Ivy's told him that slaves don't have friends, that they never have husbands or wives or anything of the sort. Charlie wasn't his wife, but they lay together every night and took comfort in each other's nearness. And Dane as well; lying snug between his spare little body and Ivy's great heavy one while a cold wind whistled through the eaves and rain blew against the windowpanes was just about the loveliest thing Charlie could imagine.

“You were well looked after, weren't you? Nice and fat and spoiled, all heavy with your master's foal...”

“Not his. I mean... my first master, a long time ago, he sired his own foals on me. And then he got married, and his wife didn't like me, so he sold me off.” Charlie remembers the livestock market, the long days of lying in a cramped stall like a pig at the county fair, sweaty and thirsty and miserable and all the free men and women passing by without sparing him a glance. He was fed very seldom, never got to wash himself, had to piss right in the sawdust where he slept. He lived like that for a while, passing from one master to the next, different men buying him up and dumping him off trying to make a profit until he ended up in the basement where he met Ivy.

“Rather a stupid man, wasn't he?” The gentleman sits on the bed, unbuttons his trousers and frees his hard cock, which is among the largest that Charlie's seen and very nicely shaped as well, though-- Charlie thinks, feeling disloyal- not quite as nice as Ivy's. He pats his thigh beckoningly, and Charlie takes up the traditional position. He feels comfortable now, confident in his ability to please this man, as this is perhaps the one thing he possesses a true talent for. He'd shown promise almost immediately when his first master set him at the task, needed very little correction after those first few times. His first master was a gentleman farmer, liked to come in from the fields at the end of a long day and sit down in his comfortable chair in front of the fire with Charlie crouching between his spread legs. Sometimes he'd stroke Charlie's hair or touch his face or fondle his tits, but mostly he ignored him, didn't speak to him or touch him, acted as though he wasn't even there. Through long experimentation, Charlie learned what his master enjoyed most. What was interesting, he thought, was that men were all different. He tried the same tricks with Ivy and Dane and quickly found out what they liked and disliked, and now here before him is yet another man offering himself, trusting Charlie with his most vital and sensitive parts.

“Such a good girl,” the man groans when Charlie takes him in his mouth; of course he can't say anything now, but he registers the error with annoyance. He closes his eyes, lets his teeth drag gently over the length of hard flesh as he moves back and forth on it; something Ivy always liked, and this man appreciates it as well. Charlie feels a lump in the back of his throat, feels suddenly as if he's going to cry, which is odd because he hasn't cried in many years. Not since his first night away from home, when he was taken from his family and brought with a great many others to an encampment outside the town to be assessed for sale. They were soldiers, the men who came and dragged him out of his bed in the middle of the night, and they said they served the grand regent of the Merrimack Kingdom who always took what he wanted.

Charlie swallows his tears, swallows around the cock in his throat, continues to work at it using the various arts he's learned until the man grunts and thrusts forward and comes in his mouth. He sighs and pets Charlie's hair as he recovers from his climax, and Charlie listens to his labored breathing and can't help but feel a tiny bit of pride.

“That's all right, my little mare. Come here now, will you, spread those pretty legs and show me your hole.” Reluctantly, Charlie sits on the edge of the bed and displays himself with his knees propped apart. He pulls at the lips of his cunt, opens himself with his fingers, and the gentleman slides off the bed and falls to his knees on the floor. He closes his eyes and nuzzles Charlie's inner thigh, stubble scraping lightly against the sensitive skin. Charlie waits, holding his breath, clutching the mattress with both hands.

“That's a lovely thing, isn't it? Have you ever been licked before?” More nuzzling and heavy breathing and the merest touch of a tongue to Charlie's clit, which he realizes still has some sensation left after all. He does his best to keep his legs from twitching as the man delves deeper between them, tries not to groan or cry out or scream as the deft tongue brings him closer and closer to coming and of course now he's thinking of Ivy and not the man who's actually crouching before him and licking him with a great deal of slurping slavering gusto. He's thinking of Ivy, although Ivy never made those noises, was always more or less silent; Ivy, as well, seldom licked his cunt in this position, preferring to approach it from behind.

Charlie gasps, not daring to move his hands from the mattress, and he feels all the muscles in his body tautening in preparation for his climax and when he comes he'd swear he hears Ivy's voice, his low murmuring, the reassurances he'd chanted late at night when Charlie couldn't sleep, when he was too heavy, when his entire body ached and trembled with the massive fatigue of pregnancy. Charlie slouches backward, falls onto the mattress with his legs still sprawled apart, and the gentleman mounts him, stiffening cock in hand.

“You can't...” Charlie doesn't know how to say it, can only use his fingers to demonstrate. “Look. It's sealed up. Your cock won't fit.”

“Ah.” The man seems unperturbed, only sits there astride Charlie smiling and stroking himself as Charlie frantically stabs with his fingers at the immovable blockage, the cut flesh of his innards all healing together in an itchy lumpy mass, his birth canal no longer distinct from the structures around it. Now he's nearly crying again as he tries to force himself open, and it's unbearable to think that he'll never stretch around Ivy's cock again, never feel it sink into him from behind, never bear down on it and feel its rigid length inside him, all that thickness and slickness and warmth, Ivy grunting and nibbling his neck and driving into him over and over again.

“Come on now, none of that.” The gentleman is still somehow being kind to him, despite his obvious unsuitability. “I'm sure you don't need to cry.” His cock rests thick and heavy and warm on Charlie's stomach, and Charlie instinctively begins to raise his hips, but the itching and aching between his legs won't go away and he can't open up, can't take this man's cock as he should, and his frustration mounts and the next thing he knows tears are pouring down his cheeks.

“You silly mare. You have another hole, don't you?”

“You've already had my mouth.” Charlie gulps back his tears, shakes his head, tries to swallow the heavy solid lump of misery stuck in his throat. “Begging your pardon. Sir.”

“No, not your mouth.” The man brings his fingers to his own lips and wets them with saliva, then passes them under Charlie's body, over the fleshy lips of his cunt, between the cheeks of his ass. There's an opening there, of course there is, but a man who's paid to fuck a slave girl couldn't possibly find satisfaction in it. Charlie knows that men use this hole when they fuck each other, but he's never taken a cock in his; he supposes now he might as well, having no more attractive option to offer his customer.

“I don't suppose I can fault you for not understanding. Well, why would a broodmare need to know?” The man opens Charlie's hole with his fingers, slowly and gently and with a great deal of lubrication- it feels wet, almost as wet as his cunt used to be, and it doesn't hurt when the man's cock enters it, just as slowly, in fact it feels-- well, actually, Charlie is astonished at how good it feels. He had never offered this to Ivy or Dane, never knew it was worth offering, but the pleasure is completely new and undeniable, and the gentleman seems to enjoy it as well.

“Tight, isn't it? By the claws and teeth of the Mother--” There's more cursing, and yelping, and grunting, and altogether this man is far louder than Ivy or even Dane has ever been, and Charlie joins in, in spite of himself. He groans aloud with pleasure, remembers he doesn't need to keep biting his lip and clamping down on his cries of delight, that there's no way Everett can hear him now.

“You like getting bred good and proper, don't you? Full of all that good seed, wherever you can take it, like it dripping from your ass and your cunt, drooling from your mouth, all over your tits... what if I come on your tits, eh, how'd you like that, too bad you aren't pregnant now, I'd like to see you when they're hanging down heavy, all fat and swaying with milk for your calf...” More gasping and moaning, and pretty soon he's apparently beyond words, which Charlie considers to be just as well.

Then he goes completely silent, no grunting or groaning, and then a long slow rattle of breath issues from him and his eyes go wide and bulge out of his head and blood spurts from his mouth, which is hanging open like a dead man's, and then Charlie sees someone standing behind him but he doesn't get a good look at whoever it is because the gentleman's body slumps forward and falls onto him and he has to claw and scrabble out from underneath.

“Stop,” he hears himself saying, nonsensically, pleading automatically with he doesn't know who, either the dead man (he's dead now, isn't he, limp and sprawled and slowly leaking blood from mouth and eyes and ears) or the one who's standing over him, he's still there, Charlie's pretty sure he's a man judging by his great height and massive shoulders, in fact there's only one man he's ever met who's so tall, who has shoulders like that. With new strength Charlie kicks at the dead weight covering him, finally gets his feet under it and pushes it to the floor.

Standing there by the bed holding a long wet knife is Ivy, of course it's him, and Charlie lunges forward and throws his arms around Ivy's neck and burrows into the bloody front of his shirt, and everything's sticky and warm and smells like when his ma used to slaughter pigs behind the shed but Charlie doesn't care because his body remembers and belongs with Ivy's and Ivy remembers him.

Then he feels a hand on his shoulder and he turns around, clinging one-armed to Ivy, and Dane is standing there just as reeking and gory and just as glad to see him. He grins with his sharp white teeth and pulls Charlie toward him and for a while the three of them just stand there clutching each other, cemented together by Mother knows whose blood, Ivy still holding his knife. He's the first one to break away, and he picks up the spotted fur cloak that the gentleman had worn and drapes it around Charlie's shoulders.

“Take his boots too,” Dane says, and the boots are still on the man's feet and, working together, he and Ivy pry them loose. They're too big for Charlie but obviously brand new and well made, and Dane and Ivy are just as haphazardly dressed as he is but they're all wearing clothes and no collars anymore. Dane spots another exit, a narrow hallway leading to a servant's stair, and it's splintery and rickety but passable, and they leave by the back door which is hanging from one hinge and half-hidden by blackberry brambles.

“What did you do?” Charlie asks, both exhilarated and terrified, his heart plunging at the smell of blood. “How did you get here? Is our master--”

“Dead,” Dane supplies, gleefully. “He's dead.”

“You killed him?”

“We don't know that he's dead,” Ivy puts in, and hushes Charlie when he tries to ask more questions. He certainly doesn't feel sorry for Everett, but if Ivy and Dane killed him they're going to be found out, and if they're found out they'll be executed. Made into a public spectacle, put on display in the town square, quite possibly flogged to death like one unlucky slave Charlie had once seen when he and his old master were passing through the square on an errand. That man had only been accused of stealing his mistress' silver ring, and he hadn't been sentenced to death but he wasn't strong enough to endure a hundred lashes of the whip; a wicked-looking instrument, barbed and knotted and braided with strands of wire and Charlie remembers how it drew blood, the slave chained naked to the flagpole at the center of the square and the heavy lash falling again and again on his back and shoulders and sides.

“But that's-- if you hurt him, if you raised a hand against a free man--” Ivy shushes him again, shaking his head, and Dane shrugs.

“It's none of your affair. You never did anything to him. I didn't want to involve you at all, as a matter of fact, but Ivy, he insisted--”

“You didn't want to find me?”

“Well. Now we're outlaws again, I suppose. At least I'm used to it. Maybe we'll wind up in prison, that'll be downright cozy compared to that charnel house. Really, I knew Everett was a bit of a moron but I never thought he'd let you go to waste like that.”

“What do you mean, charnel house?” Charlie's panting with the effort of running and talking at the same time, and Ivy keeps glancing from him to Dane like he wishes they'd both shut up, but Charlie knows there was something odd about the house; the maimed girls and ruined rooms, all the mold and decay and silence...

“Let's just say they fertilize all those rosebushes with the ground-up bones of discarded broodmares like you.” At this Ivy elbows Dane in the side almost hard enough to knock him over, and Charlie would laugh if he wasn't so disquieted. “Couldn't you smell the rot? See the fresh graves? They have garden beds full of flesh-eating beetles, they bury their girls there and in a month or so they're nothing but skeletons. Then--” Ivy succeeds in knocking Dane to the ground, but he misses scarcely a beat, only grunts and hauls himself upright and carries on running. Charlie's started to fall behind; he's lightheaded, weak with hunger, still sickened by the smell of blood.

“But the girls, how do they die? Are they starved to death?”

“The gentlemen kill them, don't you see? They despise these girls. You're less than a slave to them, less than a broodmare. They consider creatures like you to be little better than insects.”

“Why... why is there such a place? Slaves aren't meant to be killed for sport like that. Especially not broodmares. They should be treated better than that, shouldn't they?”

“Perhaps. Of course men like that can't just kill any slave they like. Certainly not one who's in the prime of her life and still worth a great deal of money. That's why they come to this place, they can do whatever they want with the discards. They're so cheaply and easily acquired. Broodmares are ruined very often, you know, bred until they drop, worn out like you were--”

“Enough.” Ivy gives Dane a warning look, and Dane shrugs, feigning innocence. “Don't speak to him like that.”

“Come on, Ivy. What harm does it do? Why shouldn't he know how things are?” Ivy grumbles and mutters in disagreement, and Charlie doesn't know what to say, is reluctant to step between them. He's grateful to Ivy for defending him, but he's fond of Dane too, and he doesn't want the two of them to fight because of him.

“I'm only being honest. By the Mother, it's time someone told him the truth.”

“He knows the truth.”

“He knows very little. Begging your pardon.” Ivy grunts again, then falls silent, and no more is said until that evening, when they pitch camp a respectable distance from the road. Far enough that the light of their small fire won't be seen by travelers, and Dane hangs a kettle above the flames and boils water for tea.

What Charlie wonders, the question he really wants to ask, is where they're going to go now. He's never found himself without a home of one sort or another, and he's grateful that Ivy and Dane are with him, but they don't have a roof over their heads or any place to settle down. Charlie considers going back to his home by the river, to look for his town and his mother and father and his siblings, but chances are nothing he knew is there anymore and the grand regent of the Merrimack Kingdom has destroyed everything, stripped what he could from the land and the people and moved swiftly on to conquer someplace else. 

Charlie is quiet as he sips his tea and eats the chunks of bread and dried fruit and hard sausage that Ivy keeps pushing at him, and he listens to Ivy and Dane argue in low voices and feels strangely lonesome for Everett-- well maybe not for Everett exactly, but for his uprightness and masterly ways, the security and rectitude he represented. In that house, after all, Charlie and Ivy had had their own room; the first time Charlie had enjoyed such a luxury, a door that closed and space to be alone and think and a generously-sized bed that he had to share only with Ivy, and sometimes Dane. Charlie begins to think that perhaps they were lucky, after all, to be owned by Everett, that being owned by nobody can only be worse.


	8. Chapter 8

They manage to avoid discovery for days, sleeping where they can and eating sparingly of their foraged supplies. One night, against Ivy's better judgment, he and Dane and Charlie bed down in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse; too recently abandoned, in his opinion, but Dane swears that its previous occupants are gone for good, that no one's coming back for the piles of moldy clothes and half-empty tins of food scattered in one corner.

Ivy wakes in the middle of the night, sees the faint hallucinatory light of a bobbing lantern, hears the unaccustomed sound of voices. He lies absolutely still, catches the terrified flash of Charlie's eyes above a hand clamped over his mouth.

“Look here. What are we going to do with the female?”

“She's dried up. Infertile. I say we dump her.”

“What, just leave her in the woods? Let her wander around until she starves to death?”

“It won't take her that long. Besides, it's no use having mercy on these creatures. They really are no better than animals, look. Look at this one's face. No expression, see those dead eyes?” Now there's a man crouching next to Ivy and a hand in his hair forcing his head back, and he remains still, knows it's no use struggling until he knows exactly what he's up against.

“Dunno about that. He's pretty ugly though.”

“See there? Nothing but a beast. They kill like beasts. No remorse, no conscience. Well, that's it. They'll be made a fuss of back in town. Quite a spectacle, but it's still gonna be better than they deserve.” Ivy wonders if he's dead already, if he's somewhere else altogether, inhabiting someone else's body. Someone kicks him with a hard pointed boot, and he snarls and lunges and sprawls on the cold ground, closes his eyes against the sight of the free men closing their circle around him. They laugh, and kick him in the head and neck and sides as he rolls around clawing ineffectually at the dirt floor, all the strength somehow gone out of him like when Everett had stuck him with the needle full of poison.

Dane had saved him then, but no such assistance seems to be forthcoming now. Dane is... he's here somewhere, Ivy hears his voice, he realizes it's Dane's pleading and weeping he's been listening to ever since he woke up. Dane's on the ground nearby, sprawled on all fours with his knees splayed apart and his ass in the air, and there's a man mounting him from behind and another fucking his mouth. Ivy watches, but even this isn't enough to galvanize his weary body into any sort of action. He moves toward Dane as if in a dream, dragging himself hand over hand along the ground, and the men standing around him find his efforts quite entertaining.

“Just giving your friend a bit of a send-off,” says one. “Don't fret, he'll certainly be remembered.”

Ivy tries to speak, but he realizes he's having a nightmare, that nothing he can say will make any difference. He urges himself to wake up, and then he does, and it's bright summer daylight in the house of his old mistress, and he's lying on his straw mat by the kitchen fire. He feels vaguely as though something is wrong, but he can't remember what it is. This is his home, and has been for as long as he remembers; surely he's never known another master or mistress, surely he was never any older than twenty or so; here he is, after all, the young stud, his mother's firstborn, petted and cossetted and indulged in every way, a thick soft mat to sleep on in the warmest spot beside the fire. He spends his days being hired out, brought to neighboring farms and houses and towns, introduced to other masters' and mistresses' broodmares; sometimes they're locked in breeding hobbles, sometimes they're asleep, sometimes they're lying in bed waiting for him and he mounts them on a proper mattress with blankets covering his naked body as if he were a free man fucking his wife. He's a slave, and the son of a broodmare, and he'll never have a wife.

“Ivy.” Someone's speaking his name, and it doesn't sound like his mother or his mistress. It's a man's voice, somewhat familiar though he can't place it, and then a strong hand with sharp little bitten-nailed fingers is shaking his shoulder and he realizes he's not the prize stud anymore, he's no longer worth anything, he's a decrepit one-armed wreck and everything he's ever been foolish enough to love has been taken from him. The voice he hears is Dane's, and they're together, alone in the dark in a foul-smelling room like the one where they first met.

“There you are. I thought you'd gone.”

“There's nowhere to go.”

“I mean I thought you were dead. One of them threw a rock at you. Hit you right between the eyes.” Ivy realizes he has a splitting headache, and when he presses the back of his hand to his forehead he scarcely keeps from throwing up. The wound is shallow but jagged, sticky with dried blood, and he brings his hand to his mouth and licks at it, tastes a familiar salty bitterness.

“Where were you? You look like you're not really here.” Dane's breath catches, as if he's in pain. “Don't go, Ivy. I don't think I could stand it. To be alone up there.”

“Up where?”

“They're going to execute us.”

“What about Charlie?”

“I don't know.” For a long time there's no sound but Dane's labored breathing, and Ivy starts to think he's fallen asleep. “There's always something to be done with a mare. No matter how many parts she's missing.”

“He's still there. Out in the woods. They left him there to die.” No answer; Dane's asleep now, and Ivy settles down beside him, cold and aching and too far beyond exhausted to be fearful for his life. He sinks into sleep like a stone dropped in a river, and the next morning he doesn't remember what's happened or where he is until he feels the sharp stinging pain in his head and touches his fingertips to the wound. It's scabbed over, no longer bleeding, and his head doesn't ache like it did yesterday. He's full of a strange resolve, determined not to look the pathetic criminal when he and Dane are brought to the town square for their public sentencing. He'll face this punishment with dignity, prepare to accept his own death; with Charlie lost to him, the prospect doesn't seem so unappealing.

At the center of the town stands a maze of wooden scaffolding, and atop it a variety of hitching posts and stretching racks and stocks and stanchions, as well as a gibbet for hangings and a cage made of chain-link fencing. Ivy and Dane mount the steps to the platform, escorted by their retinue of prison guards. There are a few people in the square below, hurrying by with carts and parcels and baskets, uninterested in the spectacle that's about to begin; then one of them stops to stare, then another, then people are pouring out of the shops and pubs and offices and gathering around the scaffolding, laughing and talking in their groups, herds and flocks of them, gentlemen and fine ladies and shopgirls and apprentices, mothers with children and husbands with wives, slaves running errands for their masters; people of every sort and size gather rank by rank before the stage, practically the whole town has turned out for this festive occasion, to witness Dane and Ivy's disgrace.

“Don't they know it's rude to stare?”

There's Dane, his naked body, perfectly white and slender, unmarked except for the familiar old tattoo. There's something almost exalted, almost saintlike about his posture, trapped as he is with the wooden stocks locked tight around his neck and wrists, heavy iron chains weighting down his ankles so that Ivy doubts he could move them even if they weren't padlocked in place. Although he's been forced into this humiliating position, he looks almost as if he were willingly prostrating himself, offering his body to be scourged so that his soul might be purified.

“You should be quiet. They'll fuck your mouth if you talk too much.”

“I'm sure some of them are going to do that anyway.” There's a bit of a speech, the town's mayor and head of the militia and warden of the prison saying a few words, something about how important it is to maintain order and the trappings of civilization in these troubled times. Then a soldier's voice, loud and clear, inviting the men waiting in the square below to mount the raised platform and begin the punishment. They come, some alone and grimly intent, some laughing and drunk and stumbling in groups of three and four, loosening their trousers as they climb the stairs, and the first man who positions himself behind Dane's immobilized body is all too familiar, was once one of the foals Ivy sired for his first mistress. He's grown into a fine sturdy man, not as tall as Ivy but tall enough to stand out in a crowd, with good teeth and all his limbs and a very respectable crop of thick facial hair. Beneath it Ivy recognizes the faintest echo of his own features. He wonders idly if the girl he sired on Charlie will grow up to resemble him, to resemble his mother. How lovely that would be; the merest trace of Cinnamon's beauty, some small reassurance that she hasn't been lost to him forever.

“Who is it? Who's standing behind me now?”

“I told you to stop talking.” Ivy doesn't really know why he's bothering at this point; he never could correct Dane, and it's unnecessary now, they're both going to receive the same punishment no matter what he says or does.

Dane falls silent, but the crowd beneath them is still seething and murmuring, whispering lewdly, commenting on this or that aspect of the prisoners' displayed bodies, and Ivy hears more than one voice querying about his missing arm but that doesn't matter now. All he can think of is how unpleasant this is likely to be, how little he relishes having anything penetrate his ass; though he has once or twice allowed Dane to fuck him as a kind of favor, a gesture of goodwill, and Dane in turn has allowed Ivy to do things to him that he finds unpleasant.

“Look at that,” someone shouts, as the man standing behind Dane leans forward and starts, businesslike and without apparent pleasure, to thrust into him. “He likes it. Ain't even a punishment for that one, skinny little slut.” Dane is blank-faced, empty, his head hung down, as if he's finally decided to follow Ivy's advice. To withdraw from his body, to allow the jeering crowd to mock and grope and fuck and dishonor it as they will, because it really has nothing to do with him. Dane, the real Dane, is separate from his earthly vessel, this machine made of bones and flesh. Then Ivy realizes that Dane's face is dripping with tears, that he's weeping, as more men swarm around him, press their cocks against his face and neck and sides and chest, begin to rub and rut on him, and men are surrounding Ivy as well and he loses sight of Dane in the crowd. All he can see now is anonymous cocks sticking out over the waistbands of trousers, most with hands wrapped around them, coaxing them to stiffness.

It's unpleasant, of course, even more so than Ivy might have imagined, but his knack of retreating into his mind while his body is being abused serves him well enough, and he doesn't suffer as much as he knows Dane's suffering, but they both survive the evening; the seemingly endless parade of cocks, then several showy but ineffectual beatings with whips and switches and belts and lengths of wire. They're turned into their stall again, given water but no food, and Dane is crawling around in a delirium, flinching from Ivy's touch, struggling mightily when Ivy tries to pin him on his side, to hold him still so he won't hurt himself.

“Don't touch me! Don't-- you beast, you animal, get your hands off me—” Like an animal himself, Dane snaps and snarls at Ivy, and Ivy avoids his pointed teeth as best he can. Dane thrashes and strikes out, kicks and claws and scrabbles, finally deflates and lies still on his side with his slim ribcage heaving pathetically, up and down in great sobbing breaths. He gasps as if he's in pain, and Ivy sits still, watching him with wary and somewhat clinical curiosity.

“What's happened to you?” No answer, only more gasping and groaning, and Ivy lets him be, hoping he'll fall asleep, but he doesn't, just keeps twitching and sobbing and muttering to himself; he's certainly in a far worse state than Ivy's ever seen him before, and if he refuses to be comforted... the two of them can't go on like this, they need to sleep, to regain their strength. Ivy doesn't know how long he sits upright with his arm across his knees and his chin resting on his arm and his eyes half-lidded but aimed in Dane's direction, bearing silent witness to his discontent. Finally Dane's noises subside; he's curled up on his side with his head in his arms, but no longer weeping, only breathing with a windy heartbroken sound, and Ivy suspects that he's still awake.

“Are you finished?”

“Finished. Ended. Put me out to pasture, I'm ready to go.”

“That kind of talk's no use.” Ivy touches Dane again, and Dane lets him, rolls onto his back and unfurls slightly, allows his head to come to rest in Ivy's lap. “You've received a just and fitting punishment for the crimes you've committed. It might have killed you, but it didn't. You ought to be glad.”

“You...” Dane seems about to rail at him again, then loses steam. He burrows deeper into Ivy's lap, and Ivy pulls the one thin inadequate blanket around both of them. With their combined body heat cocooned into the smallest possible space, they'll stay warm enough.

“We knew,” Ivy says, gently, moving his hand over Dane's hair in a cautious stroking motion, so cautious that Dane must hardly feel it at first; he relaxes, and accepts, and Ivy grows bolder. He touches Dane's face, and Dane turns his head to kiss Ivy's hand. “We knew when we did it. How it might be.”

“You didn't do anything. Not at first. It was my fault.” Dane's voice is hoarse from weeping and groaning and crying out, and Ivy shushes him and strokes his hair as if he were a child. Ivy remembers being a child, his mother comforting him, mare and foal side by side in their humble bed of straw mats; his mother's hand cool on his cheek, his forehead, soothing him, and a song... there was a song she used to sing, as well:

_“The gray mare stood under the red apple tree_  
And down blew the wind from the east and the sea,  
And down fell the apples, one, two and three,  
And she ate them, the seeds, skins and all.  
Oh, why do the apples have to fall?  
Oh why do the apples fall from the tree  
On a day so fair, by the fine blue sea,  
And why do you mourn so constantly  
For all the red apples that fall? 

_Oh why do you cry, my lonely one,_  
For the falling stars when the day is done,  
And the dying clouds and the sinking sun?  
For the grass is soft and the spring is fair,  
And the song of the birds is in the air  
And the bloom of the apple has yet to fall,  
Oh why would you weep, why weep at all? 

_Oh why would you cry when the north wind blows_  
The little gray clouds that follow the snows  
And the appleseed hides in the heart of a rose  
And your own mother knows that her dear one knows,  
Knows that I love him so?” 

There are more verses, and Ivy tries his best to remember, and finally Dane falls asleep with a smile on his lips. Ivy is oddly contented-- in spite of his comfortless surroundings, everything he's been forced to endure today and the prospect of further punishments- and when he sleeps he dreams of his mother. He wakes warm the next morning, Dane still bundled up beside him.

“Ivy.” Dane's clutching at him, wrapping around him, the fever-warmth of his skin waking Ivy's blood, and he realizes he has an erection; he often does, in the morning, but now he somewhat wishes he didn't. Unbidden thoughts of Dane being used by all those men in the town square spring to his mind; all those men fucking him in broad daylight, surrounding him, grasping and groping at him, one holding a hand over his mouth while another one--

“I'm sorry,” Ivy says, even though Dane can't possibly know what he's thinking about.

“I told you, it isn't your fault.” Dane stretches, and all of his joints make dry hard popping noises, all his bones settling back into place. “Mother! Could do with a wash right now.” Dane's tone is casual, uninjured, but Ivy hears the deep disgust it masks clearly enough. The both of them are covered and crusted with spunk, the issue of dozens of men spattered and dried on their skin, and the truth is it itches and Ivy would give just about anything right now for some good strong soap and a basin of hot water.

“Here.” Ivy wets a corner of the blanket with the last of their drinking water and begins to swab at Dane's inner thighs, and Dane obligingly parts his legs, tilting his head to watch Ivy work. Ivy scrubs hard enough to pinken the skin, Dane's thighs and ribs and belly and buttocks, his chest above the collarbones, his shoulders, his face... there's scarcely an inch of him that hasn't been anointed, and he's hanging his head in shame again by the time Ivy's finished.

“Mother.” Dane crosses his arms on his chest, and Ivy nuzzles him, gets both legs around him and ruts gently on his thigh, signaling his interest. Seeing Dane like this makes him want to come, and he knows that's wrong but he also knows that he feels good, that for the first time since their capture he isn't too despondent to want to put his cock in anything.

“Ivy...” Dane opens his mouth, leaves the light imprint of his sharp little teeth in Ivy's shoulder. Ivy presses him down and climbs astride him, and Dane is all pink and white, marked with stripes from being switched the day before, and deeper welts where someone's pewter belt buckle bit into his skin. “What's this? Want to take your turn with the slut?”

“Shush.” Ivy trails his fingers down Dane's belly, traces the curve of his hip, strokes the tight damp curls of his pubic hair. He wraps his hand firmly around Dane's cock, and Dane splays his legs wide, arches his back, grunts with pleasure as Ivy begins to stroke him in earnest. Ivy's fingertips once more encounter the healing seam where Dane's balls were removed, the delicate skin sac slit through and cut away from his body. He presses down on it, and Dane whines, his thighs jerking together, trapping Ivy's hand between them.

“Ivy, please...” Dane reaches up with one slim hand and cups Ivy's cheek, looking at him as if he's stunned by this familiar sight, Ivy looming above him, beginning to pant, his cock sliding slick and hard against Dane's thigh. His other hand he insinuates between their bodies to grasp Ivy's cock and guide it inside himself, and Ivy fucks him much more slowly and carefully than usual, mindful of his gasps and tremors of pain, the bruises and marks on his skin, the beaten red-meat rawness of his inner thighs. He nibbles Dane's neck, kisses his shoulders, sucks at the fragile skin over his collarbone. Dane's chest is still entirely hairless, which Ivy's come to find endearing, but his armpits contain small nests of ginger-colored fur, and Ivy nuzzles them, letting Dane's sweet salt scent fill his nostrils.

“Get away from there, you know I haven't washed.” Dane laughs, fending Ivy off with pointed elbows, and it seems like a long blissful time before they both come; while he's inside Dane, Ivy forgets everything but his task, leans into it with the simple-minded strength of a beast. Afterwards he's able to fall asleep again, but when he wakes he's alone in the cell. Someone's taken Dane, and the filthy blanket they'd both nestled in, and left another tin pan full of water and a small cloth-wrapped bundle that turns out to contain half a loaf of bread and a pair of bruised yellow apples.

Ivy passes two long dull days alone in his prison, reflecting on just how much of a difference it makes whether or not there's someone here to comfort him, to huddle against him and make soothing noises, to touch and talk to him and sleep by his side at night. He's unaccustomed to being alone, unnerved by the silence around him, the nothingness reverberating inside his head. He stops wishing for Dane to return, stops wishing for food or a blanket or a bath or a proper place to relieve himself. He does nothing but endure, his existence reduced to the simple unconscious processes that continue whether he wants them to or not. He breathes, and his heart beats, but other than that he's as lifeless as a stone.

On the third day, there's a knock at the cell door, and he rouses from his stupor enough to wonder who it is and why they won't just enter. Then there's the sound of the latch being thrown back, and the door opens, and there's a man standing there who isn't a soldier or a prison guard. He's tall and broad with a neatly trimmed beard and faded red hair, and his clothes are ordinary, though his boots are splendid and well-polished and tooled with silver, finer than anything Ivy's seen before. The man approaches him, and still Ivy does nothing, remains slumped in his corner with his back against the wall and his arm wrapped around his knees.

“Hey,” the man says. “Look alive there, kid.” Ivy glances up at him, sees that he's grinning behind the thick reddish-gold beard. He crouches down next to Ivy and touches his shoulder, and Ivy doesn't even have the energy to recoil from him.

“Look, I've made arrangements for you. You and your friend, I've had you both pardoned. You're coming with me.”

“You're the king.” Only the Lord Regent of the kingdom can pardon criminals, and Ivy's heard stories about Andrew the hermit king, his house and his land and his harem, his alliances with the snakes who live underground, his victories and conquests, the blood that's been spilled in his name. The soldiers who had taken Charlie from his home, who had killed his mother and brothers and raped him and sold him into slavery, had been acting on King Andrew's orders.

“I'm Andrew. Now come on, I'd rather not have them drag you out of here.” Ivy stands up at the king's urging, his body following orders without his mind having much say in the matter. Andrew is the master of masters, has dominion over anyone who might purchase Ivy and own him, has the power of life and death over his subjects. Ivy follows him; his body is heavy and sore and his mind is full of condemnations and resentment, but still out of some dimly understood sense of duty he does as he knows he must, allows King Andrew to lead him down the dingy prison corridors and out into the courtyard, where Dane is standing waiting for them, flanked by two guards with rifles by their sides.

As soon as Dane catches sight of him he breaks away from the guards and flings himself on Ivy, but no one reaches out to grab him and pull him back, no one's even watching him that closely, the king and the two armed men converse among themselves and Ivy doesn't hear what they're saying and Dane wraps around him and sobs into his neck, wetting Ivy's skin and hair with his tears. Ivy wraps his arm around Dane, and they stand holding each other for what seems like a long time before King Andrew nudges them apart and they follow him across the courtyard to a new brightly-polished brougham, smooth black with silver trim, standing behind a team of spotted horses. Dane pats the neck of the horse nearest him as he passes by, before he climbs up to his seat. He loves the beasts of the field, the humblest of creatures, those born to be broken to the harness; and what is Ivy after all but another domesticated beast?

The brougham rattles on and on, out of town and down the old dirt road and down another unfamiliar path, and Dane falls asleep with his head on Ivy's shoulder, and Ivy watches out the window for a sign, for any recognizable landmark. They pass the mounds that the snakes have made, strange pyramids of dirt and stones, heaps of boulders jumbled together, now overgrown with brush and weeds and sapling trees. Here and there are yawning holes in the ground, entrances to the underground tunnels where the snakes spend all their days, eating and mating and sleeping in great tangled masses. Ivy's never seen one, they all went back underground well before he was born, and he knows that they no longer leave their burrows to hunt, but still he's uneasy at the sight of the yawning pits and towering mounds, wishes that he could close his eyes and forget about them.

At last they arrive at the Grand Regent's palace, a shabby sprawl of outbuildings connected by wooden walkways to a forlorn post-and-beam structure that looks as if it was once a stable, roofed with rotting thatch that's falling to the ground. Andrew ushers them inside, and they stand-- Dane still half-asleep, leaning on Ivy for support- in a narrow dark hallway with a bench and a mirror and a chest of drawers and many dark doorways opening on it, and Ivy can't make out much in the gloom but now there's someone coming down the hall, a woman maybe, wrapped in heavy cloaklike garments, a shadow made of soft gray wool. The apparition kneels before Andrew and throws back its hood and Ivy sees that it's a man, a man with dark hair and fair skin and a very cruel and precise sharpness about his features.

“What are these dumb animals? What have you dragged home with you this time?”

“Prisoners. They were going to be executed.” Andrew rests a hand on Ivy's shoulder, looks up at him with something strangely like paternal pride. “Wouldn't that have been a waste of good horseflesh? Look at the stallion here, there's a great deal more use to be got out of him. He must have been someone's prize possession once. Pretty handsome beast, don't you think?” He gives Ivy a comradely slap on the shoulder, and Ivy looks down at the carpet, ashamed to be seen like this and unnerved by the naked contempt in the eyes of the man (Andrew's man, most likely another slave) now standing before him and looking him up and down.

“I suppose his body's all right. What's left of it.”

“Don't be so critical. He's got everything he needs to stand at stud.”

“Begging your pardon, not one of the mares in your harem deserves to be polluted by this wall-eyed brute's inferior seed. I hope you didn't pay more than his meat's worth.”

“What if you were bred to him, Scheherazade? You've got similar coloring, might get a nice matched pair out of the two of you. That would really be something.” Andrew's man-- or mare, apparently, unless he's jesting- flushes bright red and shows his teeth in a marvelously disdainful grimace. They continue in this vein for a while longer, and Ivy can't bring himself to pay attention, starts to sway on his feet and leans against the wall so he won't fall down. At last Andrew remembers that he and Dane are still waiting to be dealt with, and he sends the three of them to the basement, instructing his slave to bathe and dress the new arrivals.

In the basement, Andrew's man strips to the waist and unrolls a long rubber hose and starts wetting Dane and Ivy down, desultorily, not bothering to avoid spraying water into their eyes or mouths. He hands Ivy a greasy lump of soap and Ivy scrubs Dane, and then himself, as thoroughly as he can. The last of the dirt and blood and spunk crusted on their skin washes away, and it feels wonderful, though he wishes he could ignore Andrew's slave and his half-lidded hateful gaze, his expression obviously calculated to make Ivy feel lower than the grime streaming away from his body and disappearing into the drain in the floor.

“Scheherazade?” Dane says, once they're towel-dried and more or less respectable, sorting through King Andrew's stores of clothing for serviceable items; something that's unavoidably much easier for Dane than it is for Ivy.

“Noah. He thinks he's being amusing, calling me by a woman's name.”

“You're a mare,” Ivy says; he's seen Noah's slim white torso and his scarcely discernible breasts, can't help but be reminded of Charlie. The two of them must be nearly of a height, although Noah is much sharper and narrower, without an ounce of fat to spare.

“So vulgar. Still, I don't suppose you can help it. Here, I'll show you where you'll sleep tonight.” There's a jumble of furniture in the far corner of the basement, tables and chairs and an old velvet-cushioned settee and an armoire and a canopied bed covered in spotted skins, and that's where Ivy and Dane bed down together, clean and dry and decently clothed and too tired to speak or touch or do anything but nest in the dusty skins and sleep, back to back, gratefully seeking the solace of their separate dreams. Ivy dreams of Andrew's mare, his high breasts and elegant shoulders, his back gracefully swayed, his neck as fine and slender as a swan's. He's beautiful, sparkling and brittle like the first winter ice on the river, the silver filigree glinting at the water's edge.


	9. Chapter 9

Ivy wakes in the middle of the night with the strange musty smell of old dry fur in his nostrils, tries to remember where he is, gives up and rolls over and closes his eyes again, reaching out for Dane's familiar body still resting beside him. He buries his face in the back of Dane's neck, his hair grown lank and shaggy, now clean and smelling of King Andrew's soap, some flowery scent that Ivy can't quite place. He can't help but remember the way Andrew's mare had looked at him, the disdainful set of his mouth, the way it turned up ever so slightly at the corners, as if Ivy's disgrace were amusing to him. Ivy's seen such mares before, women so beautiful that they could do whatever they pleased, that slaves and kings alike knelt and groveled before them and begged to do their bidding.

He sleeps and sleeps, waking briefly to drink water and broth offered to him by people whose faces and voices he instantly forgets, and sometimes Dane is beside him and sometimes he isn't, but the furs underneath him are wonderfully soft and comfortable and he starts to think he might never rise from this bed, that he'll expire gratefully and painlessly right here in the cellar beneath the Grand Regent's palace and be buried in the woods with generations of other nameless slaves.

Then one morning he wakes feeling stronger, ready to rise from his bed and walk around, and though standing up makes him feel weak and dizzy again he grasps the bedpost to steady himself and stands there for a moment listening to his heart beat. It seems strange now, no longer a slow steady rhythm but a series of stutters and starts, and he's short of breath in a way that's at least familiar. He hasn't been looked after properly in prison, of course there was no one there to care about the trouble he has with breathing, the diagnoses Pitt's doctor had made. It doesn't matter now; he belongs to the Grand Regent, who spends the lives of slaves as if they were silver dollars, who doubtless thinks of Ivy and Dane as so much disposable flesh.

It's dark in the basement, very little light filtering through the tiny grimed-over windows, much too small to be of any use to Ivy and fitted with iron bars besides. There seems to be nothing down here but abandoned furniture and heaps of moldering skins, but Ivy keeps searching and eventually turns up a stub of candle on a saucer and a tiny cardboard box with a single match still in it. By this thin wavering light he makes his way to the stairs, which are steep and crumbling and seem to go on forever. When he reaches the top he nearly drops the candle in his haste to press the heel of his hand to his chest, to try to comfort his shuddering heart. It twists and writhes in his chest, and he begins to wonder if this is how he might die, on his knees in a basement doorway in a house that seems to be full of sorrows, veils of mourning and silence as tangible as cobwebs draping every wall and fixture, settling heavily over the floors.

As Ivy kneels there on the dusty cement step, the door swings inward and Noah steps into the light from the candle. He's dressed in worn old canvas trousers and a loose-fitting sweater made of soft red wool, ragged at the hem and adorned with fingertip-sized holes, the hard white shine of his bare skin showing underneath. As Ivy had noticed the night he was brought here, Noah appears to have no hair on his body whatsoever; Ivy remembers him standing shirtless in the flickering basement light, his chest and stomach as smooth as water, his clean armpits without a trace of stubble remaining. He has no marks that Ivy could see, no master's initials, no prisoner's brand.

“Look who's out of bed, then. I suppose you've decided to live after all.” Noah steps away from the door, waves Ivy into the hallway. “Come on. The king will want to see you.”

“Why--” Ivy realizes he can't speak, that his tongue is too heavy, that everything inside his throat feels like it's rusted together. Noah cocks his head, looks at him pityingly as he gags and hacks, trying to bring up the rest of the sentence.

“Why are you so pathetic? I haven't the faintest idea. Maybe it's because your mother was some floppy-titted old cow who spent her life chained in a corner getting fucked from both ends. It's probably not her fault you turned out to be so ugly, though.” Noah smiles thinly, and Ivy struggles to his feet, feeling his heart flail against his ribs, his vision beginning to fade, glowing red and then white as he registers what Noah's just said. He's seldom been spoken to so rudely, and in his current enfeebled state he doesn't know how to react, though his first instinct is to lash out and lash out hard. He resists the urge to throw a fist into Noah's face, keeps his arm resolutely pressed to his side, his jaws clenched together so he can't speak, though Noah's still smiling up at him, clearly very pleased with himself. 

He's not afraid of Ivy at all, clearly delights in provoking him, and Ivy learned long ago not to give such people the satisfaction of seeing him lose control of his temper. He has no temper, it was trained out of him when he was a colt, all he has is a series of calm and correct responses, a range of facial expressions carefully calculated to make him seem as though he's paying attention while giving nothing away. He can't keep from grinding his teeth a little, however, and he can tell Noah's heard it. He seems satisfied for now with this demonstration of Ivy's weakness, and leads him to King Andrew's front parlor without saying anything more.

There's the king with one of his women seated before him sucking his cock, and two more on either side of him reclining on velvet cushions, and Ivy finds himself imagining how Charlie would look there, his naked pink-flushed skin against the rich tasseled blue velvet, the lean strength of his body, the firm muscles of his arms and legs, the hair curling over his pubic mound and trailing up his belly. He was never as refined as Noah, never so well-tended. Noah is polished and smoothed like a white stone, waxed and plucked to perfection, the hair on his head oiled-smooth and dark and full of gentle picturesque curls that Ivy assumes are the result of great diligence with some barbaric heated implement.

“Ivy.” King Andrew looks up, does seem genuinely pleased to see him. Noah urges him forward with a slap on the rump, Andrew laughs, the harem girls glance at him and then lower their eyes demurely. The one sucking Andrew's cock springs to her feet and bolts from the room, and Ivy kneels in her place, feeling as if his movements are predetermined, as if he's already survived this many times over.

“Where's Dane?” he says. That wasn't what he'd expected to come out of his mouth, but the king doesn't seem surprised. He strokes Ivy's hair with his meaty red hand, bends down to speak to him, all but whispers in his ear.

“He's down below in the fields. Down the hill, tending to the cattle. Don't worry, you'll see him again tonight.” Andrew says nothing more, but he's sitting upright with his legs spread and his hand in Ivy's hair, and it seems like a test of his loyalty. If he doesn't go on kneeling for his king, if he doesn't suck Andrew's cock now, he could be thrown aside again. Imprisoned, executed, sold to another brothel; he doesn't know what could become of him, and it seems like a lesser blow to his dignity just to lean in and take the king's cock in his mouth. It's not very large, and it fits easily, and Ivy swallows around it as he's been taught to do, as he'd learned when he was little more than a colt. Andrew strokes his hair and praises him, and at some point Ivy realizes that the harem girls are gone and Noah's entered the room. He's sitting in the chair next to Andrew's, leaning forward with his legs crossed and his head resting on his fist, looking as though he's feigning interest in the scene before him.

“Oh, you poor thing. You'll be stuck here all night, it takes him hours to come.” He laughs, and the king doesn't admonish him, only invites him to look closer, to examine Ivy's face from this convenient angle, to assess his technique for faults.

“He's a pretty decent cocksucker. It's not what he's been trained for, though, you can tell.”

“Can you?” Andrew laughs, and cups one of his big hands around Ivy's face, and it's warm and not especially unpleasant and Ivy closes his eyes and thinks of the home he lost long ago, his mistress and his mother, the life he had with them before he was sold for the first time, before he lost his arm. He's able to lose himself almost completely, to forget who and where he is now while continuing to perform his task, and it seems that Andrew is close to coming, and then Noah speaks up again.

“Have him strip, I want to see if his cock is hard.” Ivy doesn't wait for the order to come from Andrew. He withdraws, and stands upright, and strips off his borrowed clothes very quickly and brusqely; it isn't difficult, he's not even wearing trousers, only a sort of kilt fashioned from someone's huge old cotton work shirt, and underneath it his cock is limp between his legs and he can see Noah looking at him, examining and assessing, and once more he feels more ashamed of himself than he thought he was capable of, once more he just wants to cover himself, to protect his body from Noah's disdainful gaze. Foolish, he thinks, how foolish it is to be so ashamed, what does it matter who looks at him now, he's been disgraced before, paraded naked through the town where he once lived, he's suffered every humiliation that can possibly be inflicted on him and still he discovers there are new depths to plumb. He burns with shame, despises himself for feeling this way, and Noah's smile grows wider, as if he knows exactly how Ivy feels, as if all of this is exactly what he wants.

“Well, I suppose he'll do. Not such a bad old body after all.”

“You like him, don't you?” Ivy kneels again and Andrew resumes stroking his hair, holding the back of his head and thrusting rhythmically in and out of his mouth, but he's watching Noah, gazing at him with fondness, as if Noah is someone he cares for the way men care for their wives; but that's impossible, he's only a broodmare, and one who's not yet borne foals for his master, if Ivy's any judge. He's seen many mares' bodies, and Noah's is too taut and smooth and slim and seemingly flawless, his skin unblemished and firm, and Ivy's sure that his cunt is like the rest of him, still tight and elastic, having not yet suffered the trauma of birth.

“He isn't so very ugly, once you get used to him. Or maybe he is, and one gets used to him all the same. He's a brute, but he's our brute now.” Noah laughs, and Ivy tries his hardest not to despise the sound.

“You don't have to be so critical.” Andrew, it seems, never corrects Noah, even when his behavior warrants it. He's always gentle with him, even when he's teasing, and it occurs to Ivy that masters don't often tease their slaves. Noah must be very precious to Andrew, likely because of his youth and his good breeding. He is beautiful, in his queer sharp-pointed way, though Ivy doesn't always find him pleasant to look at. There's that cast of cruelty in his eyes, their frequent look of half-lidded indifference, the slight sneer twisting the corners of his mouth even in what would appear to be unguarded moments.

“It's my place to be critical, if you have even the slightest intention of letting him breed me.”

“It's not for you to decide. You'll be bred to him if I will it.” Noah looks petulant, and Andrew, rather than reprimanding him, laughs. “Such a sour face. Come here, look, you can touch him if you want.” Noah leans over, languidly reaches out an arm, fondles Ivy's chest disinterestedly. He strokes Ivy's throat, presses inward with his cool soft fingertips, makes Ivy gag around the cock in his mouth, which seems to improve Noah's mood greatly. He keeps poking and prodding, won't let Ivy alone until the Grand Regent comes in his mouth, a surprisingly voluminous flood of spunk released straight down the back of his throat, and he swallows at the softening cock before it's withdrawn from him and continues to kneel upright, licking his lips. At least Andrew keeps himself very clean; his cock hardly tastes of anything.

“Good,” he praises, mildly, running his fingers through Ivy's hair. “He looks pretty like this, don't you think? So civilized, so tame, so alert.”

“This one isn't tame. He might pretend to be a domesticated beast, but he's a dumb wild brute through and through. Have you looked in his eyes? There's not the slightest bit of intelligence there.”

“You're not looking closely enough, Scheherazade.” Andrew rests one hand on Noah's hip, a gesture of intimacy that Ivy oddly dislikes having to witness. Now that neither of them is touching him, he'd thought he'd be relieved, but instead he's slightly jealous, as Noah bends down and allows Andrew to draw him into a long gentle kiss. The king is utterly absorbed, his hands on either side of Noah's head, thumbs tenderly stroking his cheeks. Ivy waits and watches, maintains his upright posture, remains focused and ready to be commanded. At length the Grand Regent dismisses him, and one of the female slaves reappears to lead him down the hall to a small parlor, where tea things and a tray of food are laid out on a low table by the fireplace. Ivy eats his breakfast alone, and afterwards falls asleep in front of the fire, wrapped in his cocoon of borrowed clothing, his mind for once utterly empty, not even Noah's taunts remaining to barb him.


End file.
